JUNE 13, 2023 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released national and regional data from the Management and Organizational Practices Survey – Hospitals (MOPS-HP), which looks at structured management practices in hospitals.

The MOPS-HP surveyed approximately 3,200 general medical and surgical hospitals nationwide about their management practices in 2019 and 2020. While the purpose of the survey was not to collect COVID-19 pandemic information, data measuring hospital management practices prior to and during the pandemic are a byproduct of the 2020 survey’s one-year recall period.

As a supplement to the Service Annual Survey (which collects data on health care and other industries in the service sector), the MOPS-HP asked hospitals how, among other things, they monitor performance, set goals and promotions, address underperformance, manage team interactions and clinical staffing, maintain standardized clinical protocols and document/keep track of patients’ medical records.  

Responses were used to construct management practice indexes for each hospital. A hospital’s management index, an average of its scores for the related questions, was constructed along with its component indexes for clinical management practices, team interactions, clinical staffing and standardized clinical protocols.

These indexes, constructed and tabulated independently for 2019 and 2020, are provided by the four U.S. regions, hospital ownership (i.e., government or private) and tax status (i.e., exempt from or subject to federal income tax). An additional table shows the share of responses for each possible answer to the questions used in constructing the indexes. These tables can be found on the MOPS-HP website.

The Census Bureau conducted the MOPS-HP as part of a statistical project with Harvard Business School.

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