RESEARCH ARTICLE
Exploring Inter-Departmental Variation in Departmental Stress Using Medical Claims Data
David W. Britt*, 1, Lydia Moore2, Brad Shuck3, Patricia Benson4, E. Kobena Osam3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 9
First Page: 1
Last Page: 8
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-9-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501609010001
Article History:
Received Date: 10/03/2016Revision Received Date: 10/05/2016
Acceptance Date: 18/05/2016
Electronic publication date: 23/06/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Background:
Over the last several years there has been an increasing emphasis on making organizations healthy and functional places to work.
Objective:
To develop a scale of departmental stress from residualized, aggregated medical-claims data.
Methods:
Following the strategy of using aggregated individual data to infer the characteristics of larger units, we use medical-claims data from a metropolitan research university. Logged residuals of average individual medical claims are aggregated over a two-year period, controlling for compositional (% Female and % 50 and older) and other factors (Department size and Presence of a lab using toxic chemicals). We then examine the internal consistency and factor structure of a scale constructed from a reduced-set of 14 ICD-9 medical claim categories.
Results:
Our results indicate a dominant primary factor that explains 44% of the common variance. The scale is also internally consistent, with a Cronbach’s Alpha of. 87.
Conclusion:
We conclude that there is meaningful, coherent variation in medical claims across departments that is tentatively interpreted in terms of departmental stress.
