1 HEALTHCARE IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

The healthcare industry represents a substantial portion of worldwide economic and social activities and initiatives and employs many people around the globe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that its member countries spend over 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare. The United States spends almost 18% of GDP and is projected to move closer to 20% in the near future (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that there are over 59 million workers in the healthcare arena, while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that the United States alone has over 18 million (Centers for Disease Control, 2018; World Health Organization, 2019).

Research about health‐related problems by operations‐management (OM) scholars is increasing: The Journal of Operations Management (JOOM) has published 22 papers on this topic (not including these in this special issue) since 2015. One reason research by OM scholars about healthcare processes has rapidly increased is the open access to rich data sets that enable investigations on core operational issues. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have collected and made available volumes of data (e.g., Ding, 2013; Dobrzykowski, McFadden, & Vonderembse, 2016; Senot, Chandrasekaran, & Ward, 2016), enabling OM researchers to partner with medical professionals to examine pressing, real world, operational issues in healthcare.

中文翻译：

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社论：以较低的成本提供有效的医疗保健：特刊简介

1运营管理中的卫生保健

医疗保健行业代表了全球经济和社会活动与计划的重要部分，并在全球雇用了许多人。经济合作与发展组织（OECD）估计，其成员国在医疗保健上的支出超过国内生产总值（GDP）的8％。美国的支出几乎占GDP的18％，预计在不久的将来将接近20％（经济合作与发展组织，2019年）。据世界卫生组织（WHO）估计，医疗保健领域有超过5900万名工人，而疾病控制中心（CDC）报告称仅美国就有1800万名工人（疾病控制中心，2018年;世界卫生组织，2019年）。

运营管理（OM）学者对与健康有关的问题的研究正在增长：自2015年以来，《运营管理杂志》（JOOM）发表了22篇关于该主题的论文（不包括在本期杂志中）。OM学者的一项原因研究对医疗保健流程的关注迅速增加的是对丰富数据集的开放访问，从而可以对核心运营问题进行调查。美国医疗保险和医疗补助服务中心（CMS）收集并提供了大量数据（例如Ding，2013年； Dobrzykowski，McFadden和Vonderembse，2016年； Senot，Chandrasekaran和Ward，2016年）），从而使OM研究人员能够与医学专业人士合作研究医疗保健中紧迫的，现实世界中的操作问题。