Publications Database
Welcome to the new Schulich Peer-Reviewed Publication Database!
The database is currently in beta-testing and will be updated with more features as time goes on. In the meantime, stakeholders are free to explore our faculty’s numerous works. The left-hand panel affords the ability to search by the following:
- Faculty Member’s Name;
- Area of Expertise;
- Whether the Publication is Open-Access (free for public download);
- Journal Name; and
- Date Range.
At present, the database covers publications from 2012 to 2020, but will extend further back in the future. In addition to listing publications, the database includes two types of impact metrics: Altmetrics and Plum. The database will be updated annually with most recent publications from our faculty.
If you have any questions or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Search Results
Massimo Sargiacomo, Jeff Everett, Luca Ianni, Antonio D'Andreamatteo (2024). "Auditing for Fraud and Corruption: A Public-Interest-Based Definition and Analysis", The British Accounting Review, 56(2), 101355.
Abstract
To better understand how the practice of auditing can be more effectively enrolled in the fight against fraud and corruption, this study (1) examines how these problems are viewed and defined by the public and (2) contrasts this view and definition with that of professional auditors. The examination is informed by the dispositive theory of Foucault and an inductive analysis of a large (90,000+) multi-year sample of news stories related to fraud and corruption in the Italian health sector. While auditors define these problems in relatively narrow terms and consign them to ‘a form of risk, a threat to reputation and revenue, and a cost of doing business,’ the study finds that the public has a broader definition and a greater concern with problematic acts and actors ‘in and of themselves’. These findings have important implications for the audit expectations gap and how it might be addressed. The study also provides a useful analytical method for locating and better understanding fraud and corruption in other large, institutional settings.Cameron Graham, Darlene Himick, Pier-Luc Nappert (2024). "The Dissipation of Corporate Accountability: Deaths of the Elderly in For-Profit Care Homes During the Coronavirus Pandemic", Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 99, 102595.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious questions about corporate accountability, exposing how poorly our systems of corporate accountability function under pressure. This paper examines one industry and jurisdiction where this problem is particularly visible, for-profit care homes for the elderly in Ontario, Canada (where the industry is called “long-term care” [LTC]). LTC companies continued to pay bonuses to executives and dividends to investors while COVID-related deaths mounted in their facilities. What does this tell us about how society holds companies accountable for their actions? This paper focuses on two highly institutionalized systems of accountability in the LTC industry in Ontario, namely healthcare governance and financial governance. We examine these two systems in the context of public pressure for regulatory action, pressure that has manifested in mainstream media coverage, social media outrage, and the threat of civil lawsuits. We compare the efficacy of healthcare and financial governance in this industry using a theoretical framework drawn from accountability literature, and explore the possibility of legal consequences for LTC corporations under corporate criminal law. We show how these systems together serve to dissipate corporate accountability through a fragmented, inadequate system of conflicting governance mechanisms, despite making a show of accountability rituals. We argue that these systems work together to divide the moral community in which corporations exist and where meaningful accountability might be possible, facilitating the misrecognition of the “corporate imaginary” as an accountable entity.Abu Shiraz Rahaman, Dean Neu, Jeff Everett (2024). "Accounting Artifacts and the Reformation of a National Healthcare System", Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 99, 102719.
Abstract
This study examines the role of ‘accounting artifacts’ in the reformation of a country’s healthcare system. Focusing on a single hospital and four decades of policy reform in the African nation of Ghana, and starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice, the study shows how different forms, constructions, and classifications of accounting information—or accounting artifacts—shape policy regimes and facilitate particular patterns of activity and interaction. The study demonstrates how these regimes and patterns, in conjunction with the embedded social memory or habitus of individual actors, in turn lead to the construction and use of new artifacts. Finally, the study highlights how hospital staff and patients use various tactics to work with and around these artifacts, resulting in at times unintended consequences and the need to pursue new policy directions. In so doing, the study furthers our understanding of why policy-reform processes in the field of healthcare are so often sequential, if not perpetual, in nature.Adam Diamant, Anton Shevchenko, David Johnston, Fayez Quereshy (2023). "Consecutive Surgeries with Complications: The Impact of Scheduling Decisions", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 43(9), 1434-1455.
Abstract
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Design/methodology/approach
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Research limitations/implications
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Originality/value
Jonah Berger and Grant Packard (2023). "Commentary: Using Language to Improve Health", Journal of Service Research, 26(4), 514-516.
Abstract
Communication plays an integral role in service interactions and language shapes how service agents talk to customers, salespeople talk to prospects, and chatbots talk to consumers. But as Danaher, Berry, Howard, Moore, and Attai (2023) note, given healthcare’s impact on quality of life, it’s a particularly important domain to study effective communication. Their useful review and framework should help medical professionals improve patient interactions and encourage future research. That said, one paper can only cover so much ground, and there are several additional areas that deserve further attention. Building on their framework, we offer some additional areas for future work, including how to use language to better understand patients, how communication mediums (e.g., writing vs. speaking or online portals vs. email) shape what gets communicated, and how effective communication depends on the interaction’s goals (e.g., persuasion vs. medical adherence).Adam Diamant, Anton Schevchenko, David Johnston, Fayez Quereshy (2023). "Consecutive Surgeries With Complications: The Impact of Scheduling Decisions", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 43(9), 1434-1455.
Abstract
Purpose The authors determine how the scheduling and sequencing of surgeries by surgeons impacts the rate of post-surgical complications and patient length-of-stay in the hospital. Design/methodology/approach Leveraging a dataset of 29,169 surgeries performed by 111 surgeons from a large hospital network in Ontario, Canada, the authors perform a matched case-control regression analysis. The empirical findings are contextualized by interviews with surgeons from the authors’ dataset. Findings Surgical complications and longer hospital stays are more likely to occur in technically complex surgeries that follow a similarly complex surgery. The increased complication risk and length-of-hospital-stay is not mitigated by scheduling greater slack time between surgeries nor is it isolated to a few problematic surgery types, surgeons, surgical team configurations or temporal factors such as the timing of surgery within an operating day. Research limitations/implications There are four major limitations: (1) the inability to access data that reveals the cognition behind the behavior of the task performer and then directly links this behavior to quality outcomes; (2) the authors’ definition of task complexity may be too simplistic; (3) the authors’ analysis is predicated on the fact that surgeons in the study are independent contractors with hospital privileges and are responsible for scheduling the patients they operate on rather than outsourcing this responsibility to a scheduler (i.e. either a software system or an administrative professional); (4) although the empirical strategy attempts to control for confounding factors and selection bias in the estimate of the treatment effects, the authors cannot rule out that an unobserved confounder may be driving the results. Practical implications The study demonstrates that the scheduling and sequencing of patients can affect service quality outcomes (i.e. post-surgical complications) and investigates the effect that two operational levers have on performance. In particular, the authors find that introducing additional slack time between surgeries does not reduce the odds of back-to-back complications. This result runs counter to the traditional operations management perspective, which suggests scheduling more slack time between tasks may prevent or mitigate issues as they arise. However, the authors do find evidence suggesting that the risk of back-to-back complications may be reduced when surgical pairings are less complex and when the method involved in performing consecutive surgeries varies. Thus, interspersing procedures of different complexity levels may help to prevent poor quality outcomes. Originality/value The authors empirically connect choices made in scheduling work that varies in task complexity and to patient-centric health outcomes. The results have implications for achieving high-quality outcomes in settings where professionals deliver a variety of technically complex services.Onder, O., Cook, W., Kristal, M.M. (2022). "Does Quality Help the Financial Viability of Hospitals? A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach", Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 79, 101105.
Abstract
In this work, we analyze the financial viability of U.S. hospitals by investigating the impact of clinical and experiential quality as its determinants. We adopt Simar and Wilson's two-stage bootstrapped truncated regression approach. Specifically, we use data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the first stage to estimate efficiency scores. Then, we use truncated regression estimation with the double-bootstrap method to test the significance of the quality variables. Given the financial problems recently experienced by U.S. hospitals, we use readmission rates and costs as our outputs to investigate how well hospitals can lower readmission rates while minimizing their costs, since recent policy changes have tied a portion of hospital reimbursements to their readmission rates, making both variables crucial outcome goals. We find that both clinical and experiential quality are significantly associated with the higher financial viability of hospitals. Further, focusing on these two quality dimensions together has additional benefits.Adam Diamant (2021). "Dynamic Multistage Scheduling for Patient-Centered Care Plans", Health Care Management Science , 24(2021), 827-84.
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Abstract
We investigate the scheduling practices of multistage outpatient health programs that offer care plans customized to the needs of their patients. We formulate the scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) where patients can reschedule their appointment, may fail to show up, and may become ineligible. The MDP has an exponentially large state space and thus, we introduce a linear approximation to the value function. We then formulate an approximate dynamic program (ADP) and implement a dual variable aggregation procedure. This reduces the size of the ADP while still producing dual cost estimates that can be used to identify favorable scheduling actions. We use our scheduling model to study the effectiveness of customized-care plans for a heterogeneous patient population and find that system performance is better than clinics that do not offer such plans. We also demonstrate that our scheduling approach improves clinic profitability, increases throughput, and decreases practitioner idleness as compared to a policy that mimics human schedulers and a policy derived from a deep neural network. Finally, we show that our approach is fairly robust to errors introduced when practitioners inadvertently assign patients to the wrong care plan.Diamant, A., Johnston, D. and Quereshy, F. (2019). "Why Do Surgeons Schedule Their Own Surgeries?", Journal of Operations Management, 63(5), 262-281.