Unfortunately, health care administrators often lack the time to design elegant health services research projects, primarily because rapid changes in the external health care industry require quick answers and actions. The Researcher's Perspective The researcher's perspective is quite different from that of the administrator. When administrators require fast answers to their questions, they may opt for technically weaker research designs, which may invalidate conclusions drawn from the research. If invalid conclusions are drawn, health care systems may either invest resources in ineffective programs or fail to invest resources in effective programs. One concern is that administrative research usually lacks the control group necessary for making strong inferences about a program's effectiveness.
History is particularly difficult to cope with given rapid changes in health care.
Bias resulting from uncontrolled studies may result either in incorrectly ascribing an improvement to an ineffective program, or failing to attribute improvement to an effective intervention. Without such measures, erroneous conclusions may be drawn. Third, different organizational units within a health care system may be implementing competing interventions in an effort to improve patient outcomes, which can waste resources and make it difficult to determine which program has led to any observed changes in satisfaction. Finally, for administrators, the primary patient-centered outcome is satisfaction. While the market-driven pace of change in the health care system may be at odds with traditional research, researchers can offer administrators content, methodological and statistical expertise, including general research design, selection of validated measures, construction of sampling frames and identification of potential sources of bias.