COVID-19 Intelligence-Driven Operational Response Platform: Experience of a Large Tertiary Multihospital System in the Middle East

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in global disruptions within healthcare systems, leading to quick dynamic fluctuations in hospital operations and supply chain management. During the early months of the pandemic, tertiary multihospital systems were highly viewed as the go-to hospitals for handling these rapid healthcare challenges caused by the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 cases. Yet, this pandemic has created an urgent need for coordinated mechanisms to alleviate increasing pressures on these large multihospital systems and ensure services remain high-quality, accessible, and sustainable. Digital health solutions have been identified as promising approaches to address these challenges. This case report describes results for developing multidisciplinary visualizations to support digital health operations in one of the largest tertiary multihospital systems in the Middle East. The report concludes with some lessons and insights learned from the rapid development and delivery of this user-centric COVID-19 multihospital operations intelligent platform.

Multimarket Contact in the Hospital Industry

Hospitals in the United States increasingly belong to multihospital systems that operate in numerous geographic markets. A large literature in management and economics suggests that competition between firms may be softened as a result of multimarket contact—i.e., firms competing with one another in multiple markets simultaneously. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in multimarket contact generated by out-of-market consolidation, I find that increases in multimarket contact over the 2000–2010 period led to higher hospital prices. These results suggest that continued hospital consolidation may produce higher prices even if that consolidation only minimally affects within-market concentration. (JEL G34, G38, I11, I18, K21, L41)