Gies College of Business continues to be at the heart of meeting challenges in the healthcare industry, many of which were addressed at the annual Midwest Healthcare Management Conference hosted by Gies Business. The following are some of the hot topics presented at the conference.

Solving drug supply shortages in rural areas

Ujjal Mukherjee (right), associate professor of business administration, is leading an effort to address drug shortages, particularly in rural settings.  His team is mapping the pharmaceutical supply chain in an attempt to understand the supplier network and the interdependency of different suppliers and organizations.

“We do feel the network helps, but it can also increase the duration of the shortage,” Mukherjee said. “It’s a dense network, and businesses are interdependent, so if there is any disruption in any of the focal dense nodes, then it can actually propagate much faster in the network.”

The study, which is in its early stages and includes researchers from the University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, seeks to determine which network structure is more vulnerable to shortages.

“They happen, but we want to determine how fast we can recover from them,” Mukherjee said.

The team analyzed different streams of data to understand how the network structure affected the supply chain.

“The globalization of the pharmaceutical industry relates to quality issues, but there is always a trade-off,” Mukherjee said. “On the one hand, it reduces the cost and increases the availability, but the same kind of practices the FDA uses to monitor drug delivery are difficult to replicate in the non-development markets.”

Mukherjee, whose primary research is in rural healthcare delivery to underserved communities, like those in China and India, has had precursor studies published in the Journal of Operations Management and has presented similar studies to the US Senate.

Well-Being and Social Media

There is growing concern that increased social media use and the advancement of AI could have a negative effect on well-being. However, Koustuv Saha, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois’ Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, has found that social media can have a positive effect in many cases. Saha has a passion for improving the mental health of college students, having had to cope with the deaths of students personally.

“It affected us even if we didn’t personally know those students,” said Saha, who has a background in NLP (Neural Language Processing). “We discovered we could use human-centered AI techniques to study the social science problems of people’s health and well-being.”

Saha reports that as many as 1 in 5 students have suicidal thoughts after a campus crisis, but when university personnel, students, and faculty post counseling recommendations and avenues for treatment on Reddit, it helped lower that rate and improve well-being.

Beyond student crises, his research surprisingly found that people who shared bad news on social media, such as being fired from a job, healed more readily than those who chose not to share these unfortunate life events.

“While it might seem counterintuitive to share negative life events like that, we found that, in general, it helped cope with these events and thus had a positive impact on sleep quality and overall well-being,” Saha said.

In addition to publishing its research findings, his team aims to work with social media companies to build design interventions and better understand users' needs on their platforms.

“In addition to addressing business needs and making their platforms more engaging, social media companies need to prioritize the well-being of their users,” Saha said.

Addressing shortages of nursing home workers

As demographics in the United States continue to skew older, nursing homes are facing persistent staffing shortages, particularly among nurses’ aides, who provide between 70 and 80 percent of the direct care to residents. These positions face high turnover and are often underpaid.

Federal regulations allow nurse aides four months to complete all required training and certification after a nursing home hires them. However, because of staffing and training disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, those requirements were temporarily relaxed nationwide in an effort to keep nursing homes fully staffed.

On June 7, 2022, the United States ended the COVID-19 emergency blanket waiver for temporary nurse aides (TNA), reinstating the four-month certification requirement. However, some states have continued to extend it because of a backlog in training and certification testing, allowing additional time to complete the 75 hours of training required to earn certified nursing assistant (CNA) status.

Minyu Ye (right), a PhD candidate in Gies College of Business, is studying the effects of these decisions by comparing results from states that have relaxed the time to certification (18 states) and those that have reimplemented the four-month requirement.

Providing daily hands-on care for residents is a major duty of nurse aides. Ye’s study found that states that continue to employ more TNAs because of extended certification timelines experienced an increase in urinary tract infections among residents. The study also found an increase in the use of urinary catheters among residents in those states.

So, health officials are faced with the dilemma of balancing quality resident care with the need to fill open positions.

“Although improved working conditions and increased wages are a baseline way to encourage nurses to go into the industry, it is not an easy solution,” Ye said. “Home care is also becoming a more popular option, giving nurses more employment opportunities outside nursing homes. This makes it increasingly important for nursing homes to find ways to maintain staffing levels without compromising care.