A case for choosing predictive statistical analytics over conventional physician planning wisdom.
The recent report “What’s really behind Canada’s unemployed specialists?” – http://www.royalcollege.ca/portal/page/portal/rc/advocacy/policy/hrh/examining_specialist_physician_employment – published by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) confirms a troubling trend that has many new specialists searching for elusive job vacancies in specific sectors within the Canadian healthcare marketplace. According to the RCPSC report the three key drivers and influencers contributing to these employment issues include: forces within the Canadian economy, the way in which the health care system is organized, and personal preferences of new graduates.
The Royal College will be hosting a National Summit on Physician Employment in February 2014 to enhance the understanding of the core issues of the problem and achieve consensus on the ways and means to manage the current challenges going forward and prevent these human resource boom-bust cycles from occurring again in the future.
Before too much time is spent following conventional wisdom bringing together pan-Canadian, multi-disciplinary working groups to gather information from all affected sectors, and then creating Task Forces to transform the information into a national Implementation Plan, and then attempt to sell the plan to reduce residency seats to Canada’s 17 university medical schools – who, by the way, are desperately competing with each other to max their enrollment to pay their bills in a rapidly shrinking student market – – – – I recommend that they give this strategy a sober second thought because there, “Is an app for that”!
Look no further than the growing trend in other high stakes professional sectors to rely less on conventional wisdom, and instead invest in the nerdy world of predictive statistical analytics.
The use of analytics was first glamorized in the popular movie “Moneyball”, starring Brad Pitt, that chronicled the true story of Bill Bean, Manager of the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB). Bean had the daunting task of trying to build a winning team as the manager of the league franchise with the smallest player payroll, to compete with juggernaut franchises like the New York Yankees corporate empire. Bean, contrary to conventional wisdom, shunned the traditional reliance on the often subjective recommendations of the team’s scouts, in favour of using statistical analytics to find little known, and inexpensive players with extraordinary key talents that when matched with other players with complimentary unique ball skills, produced a team that in 2002 finished 1st in the American League West with a record of 103 wins.
Analytics are now widely used in professional sports (including the MLB, NBA, & NFL). In international politics, analyst Nate Silver is now world famous for accurately predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 US Presidential election, and all 50 states in the 2012 election.
In Canada, Timothy Chan, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and MIT graduate, has already been using analytics to assist the Toronto health sector. Dr. Chan’s primary research interests are in optimization under uncertainty and the application of optimization methods to problems in healthcare, medicine, global engineering, sustainability, and sports – and most recently in the NHL. (Money Puck, Canadian Business, Oct. 14, 2013).
Therefore, it would appear that the best long-term solution to Canadian Specialist Physician Resource Planning is to incorporate predictive statistical analytics to create a model to measure the key variables in health sector utilization by our aging and statistically normal population – with specialist physician resource interventions in response to patient demand. This continues flow of data, available from CIHI and other reliable sector sources can then be used to predict, schedule and apportion the certification of new Specialists to match patient demand into the foreseeable future.
Phil Jost, MBA is a VP with the Canadian firm CanAm Physician Recruiting Inc., a retired health sector CEO, past CHA Board member, past Chair of the Health Assoc. of PEI and health reform author/blogger – – Follow Phil on Twitter @CanAm_Phil.
