Exploring Inter-Departmental Variation in Departmental Stress Using Medical Claims Data

Over the last several years there has been an increasing emphasis on making organizations healthy and functional places to work.

To develop a scale of departmental stress from residualized, aggregated medical-claims data.

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.

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.

We conclude that there is meaningful, coherent variation in medical claims across departments that is tentatively interpreted in terms of departmental stress.