Written by A recent study by Morgen Johansen and Jessica Sowa examines how human resource practices impact nonprofit performance in the context of hospitals.
Human resource management, employee engagement, and nonprofit hospital performance.
This type of work is challenging because it requires HR practices that are not readily available from public documents, and objective performance metrics. How did they find data for their study?
The data used in this article comes from four different data sources. The measures of employee engagement practices come from an original hospital management survey of top‐level hospital CEOs in 2010–2011. The survey was distributed to a representative sample of over 6,000 public, nonprofit, and private for‐profit hospitals in 48 American states and Washington DC; Alaska and Delaware were the only two states excluded from the survey. The response rate for the hospital management survey was 16%. For this analysis, we focus on the 476 returned surveys from top managers in nonprofit hospitals. An analysis of survey nonresponses finds no evidence for reporting bias associated with hospital size, geographic area, ownership, and service specialization (Johansen & Zhu, 2014; Zhu, Robinson, & Torenvlied, 2015).
Hospital quality metrics used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were included as objective measures of patient outcomes. In addition to the objective measures, we include perceptual performance data from stakeholders (e.g., patients) from the Hospital Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) and perceptual performance data from managers from the hospital management survey. Finally, data on hospital size, specialization, and location was gathered from the American Hospital Association’s (AHA) database.