Research Reports from the Department of Operations
Document Type
Dissertation
Publication Date
1-1-1974
Abstract
In recent years, because of the enormous financial pressure under which most universities have found themselves coupled with almost climactic national pressure from the public and politicians alike to increase the supply of physicians, much attention has been focused on the costs and managerial capabilities of the nation's academic health centers. In the cost arena the concern has been the determination of meaningful program costs -- that is, separation to the extent possible of costs associated with the major output programs of research, patient service, and education and within the education area, the separation of the costs of producing M.D.'s from those associated with the production of other types of professionals. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has pioneered in the development of a program cost finding methodology for academic health centers. It has coordinated the application of this methodology, which consists of the allocation of total actual expense and income for a past year to a dozen or so output programs, at over half of the nation's academic health centers. It has been recognized that the AAMC program cost finding methodology has two serious shortcomings which the research reported in this dissertation set out to overcome. They are first that the AAMC cost allocation procedures estimate only average program costs at one given point in time and under one given set of operating conditions. As such, they provide no information about the changes in costs associated with changes in outputs. Secondly, they tend to obscure the fact that a significant portion of academic medical center productive activities have joint product characteristics -- that is, a given activity produces two or more program outputs simultaneously and the cost of that activity is not rigorously divisible between the outputs. POPS, which is a simulation model-based, computer-aided, program oriented planning system, provides academic health center management the capability of rapidly assessing the costs associated with programmatic content or throughput changes. In addition, it rigorously separates pure activities which produce a single output from joint activities which simultaneously produce more than one output. The user has the option of having the system automatically assign joint activity costs to output programs via clearly designated, easily changeable, preset factors. POPS consists of three simulation models. PROSIM converts programmatic demands and specifications into faculty hour requirements. From these faculty hour requirements PERSIM generates the number and mix of faculty which, under preset constraints, minimizes total faculty salary expense. BUDSIM, given programmatic and faculty levels, generates a projected program budget. The POPS model system has been programmed in the BASIC language for a time-shared computer system, and has been implemented and tested at Case Western Reserve University.
Keywords
Operations research, Academic medical centers--Finance, Medical education--Economic aspects--United States, Universities and colleges--Economic aspects, Cost allocation, Health services administration--Data processing, Simulation methods, Manpower planning
Publication Title
Dissertation, Department of Operations, School of Management, Case Western Reserve University
Issue
Technical memorandum no. 330 ; Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Rights
This work is in the public domain and may be freely downloaded for personal or academic use
Recommended Citation
Kutina, Kenneth Lee, "Pops A Program Oriented Planning System for Academic Health Centers" (1974). Research Reports from the Department of Operations. 417.
https://commons.case.edu/wsom-ops-reports/417