Professor Wei Gu of the School of Economics and Management at USTB has published a study on China's medical poverty alleviation program in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, a UTD24 journal, as corresponding author.
The paper, titled "Helping Vulnerable Hospitals: Evidence from a Medical Poverty Alleviation Program," was co-authored with Professor Meng Li of the University of Houston and Assistant Professor Qiang Li of Wilfrid Laurier University. Gu is a faculty member in SEM's Department of Information Systems and Data Science.
Healthcare resources are often unevenly distributed, yet the effectiveness of government and nonprofit support programs for under-resourced hospitals has remained unclear. The study evaluates how China's medical poverty alleviation program affects service efficiency and quality at resource-constrained hospitals.
The researchers used propensity score matching combined with a multi-period difference-in-differences model to balance treatment and control departments. They found that the program significantly shortened service time by 7.22 percent and reduced the seven-day revisit rate by 3.76 percent.
The gains were especially pronounced among less experienced physicians, physicians with prior assistant experience, and physician-expert pairs with large experience gaps. The authors recommend that future programs pair external experts with junior local doctors, use assistant roles for hands-on learning, and prioritize departments with greater technological complexity, sicker patients, and higher diagnostic equipment requirements.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management is published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and is among the most influential international journals in operations management.
