Active Research

With Harshita Kajaria-Montag
Last Update: December 2025
Working Paper: Upon Request 

Aim: We introduce the concept of actionable workload transparency, an internal form of operational transparency that makes task-based workload visible to managers at the point of assignment while preserving deployment discretion, and we examine how it shapes assignment decisions and downstream outcomes.
Results: We study the rollout of a task-based workload-calculation and assignment tool at a large Midwestern academic health system that displays real-time, patient- and nurse-level workload during assignment. Greater tool use increases purposeful differentiation: charge nurses steer complex, time-intensive patients toward more experienced nurses, including themselves, while shielding junior and part-time staff. Greater tool use also predicts improved nurse retention, though sustained workload imbalance during a patient’s hospitalization associates with longer length of stay and higher risk of nurse-sensitive harm events.
Conclusion: Actionable workload transparency links real-time workload visibility to assignment behavior, workforce stability, and patient outcomes. Transparency appears to support retention, but patient gains may require guardrails that prevent workload imbalance from accumulating.

With Eric Xu, Eunae Yoo, and Hyoju Jeong
Last Update: Received a "Minor Revision" at Production and Operations Management (January 2026)
Working Paper: SSRN Link to Working Paper 

Aim: Scholars disagree on how broadband access affects educational outcomes, and almost all overlook broadband speed. We extend prior work by assessing how both broadband access and speed together influence U.S. math proficiency. 

Results: School districts with greater average access and smaller within-district gaps tend to have higher math proficiency. Nationally, a one percentage-point increase in broadband access corresponds to a greater than one percentage-point increase in math proficiency. We find speed also matters: gains rise with faster connections, then reverse at very high speeds. 

Conclusion: Access alone is not enough. Our study shows that broadband policy should move beyond "more is better" and consider broadband speeds that maximize learning. As one headmaster noted: "The internet is essential, but proceed with caution!"

With Danqi Luo and Yong Xia (PhD student)
Last Update: January 2026
Working Paper: Upon Request

Problem Definition: Emergency physicians often evaluate multiple patients before entering diagnostic orders in the electronic health record, a practice we term batch ordering. Clinical guidelines emphasize prompt ordering after evaluation, yet batch ordering remains common. How do emergency physicians structure diagnostic ordering across patients, and how does batch ordering affect operational performance and patient outcomes?
Methodology/Results: We study batch ordering across patients using detailed order-level data from over 190,000 patient encounters across two emergency departments in a large U.S. teaching hospital system. We first characterize when physicians batch and how batching responds to operational conditions. We then estimate the effect of batch ordering on performance using an instrumental-variables design that leverages variation in peers’ batching behavior. Batch ordering responds systematically to operational frictions and is not confined to low-complexity cases. Batch ordering modestly increases diagnostic turnaround for individual diagnostic orders, but it reduces variability in diagnostic completion times and shifts ordering earlier within the visit by expanding initial bundles and reducing subsequent ordering rounds. As a result, batch ordering reduces overall patient service time, with benefits concentrated under manageable congestion and attenuated when congestion is high.
Managerial Implications: Our findings contribute to operations research by treating diagnostic ordering as a cross-patient sequencing problem, beyond within-patient ordering choices. Batch ordering can improve throughput by reducing variability in diagnostic completion, but operating conditions govern when benefits appear. More broadly, the paper highlights how frontline clinicians reshape service processes through discretionary task sequencing, with consequences for throughput and patient experience. The results suggest that ED leaders should pair clinical judgment with workflow and EHR design that lowers ordering setup costs and supports smaller, targeted batches.

With Bradley Staats
Last Update: August 2023
Working Paper:  SSRN Link
Award: Decision Science Institute, Doctoral Showcase "Best Paper" (runner-up)

Methods:  Our empirical analysis combines observations from healthcare clinics across several US states, anonymized cellphone mobility data, COVID-19 severity measures, and stay-at-home orders. A Lasso-based procedure selects instruments and generates county-level measures of individual mobility, and a random forest forecast validates the insights of our descriptive approach for traffic prediction.
Conclusion: Combining observations from multiple sources allows us to evaluate how traffic to healthcare clinics changed with willingness to travel, stay-at-home orders, and other signals of environmental safety. During our study period, though patients exercised discretion in some negative ways (e.g., foregoing care), patients also shouldered some of the burden of their own wellness. In studying patient discretion, we characterize powerful predictors of healthcare traffic, we suggest how our findings might generalize post-COVID, and we encourage researchers to continue exploring the role of patient discretion in the co-production of wellness.