Health Organization Transformation

The Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT) conducts research that supports major management, clinical, and information technology innovations in health care. CHOT’s mission is to advance the knowledge and practice of transformational strategies in evidence-based management and clinical practice. Management research in health care is plentiful but has offered little to effectively address questions about how and why certain innovations work. There are many prescriptions in publications and management seminars on what to do and how to it. There are publications providing very thoughtful postmortems on failed electronic medical record systems, failed health information exchanges, short-lived and unsuccessful applications of management improvement techniques, and - on a grand scale - failed attempts at mergers or integrated delivery systems. There are fewer examples of carefully structured health care innovation efforts accompanied by real-time formative evaluation, comparing across sites or over time via quasi-experimental models, and providing scientific evidence of effectiveness or return on investment. The promise of CHOT, and where it has proved itself, is in its ability to powerfully connect health systems with university researchers and students. CHOT’s research model relies on the knowledge and experience of health care leaders to guide academic research. Such connections promise to bring more resources to the health systems to better address their management and clinical innovation interventions and broader transformational efforts. This cooperative model ensures that the research is both meaningful and applicable to the health care industry and provides immediate support for decision-making by CHOT members.