Examining the influence of scarcity, weather, and vacation on physicians' performance, mortality, and costs

Healthcare professionals are exposed to different factors that may affect their ability for decision-making. The socioeconomic and health system impacts of scarcity and focus on workflow serve as a challenge to improve resource management and maintain focus. In this study, we analyze a dataset of patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in Spain between 2010 to 2012, and 2016 to 2019, being either programmed or urgent interventions. We associated the results with a dataset from the Spanish Meteorological Agency to assess if the weather could affect the focus of physicians and the results of mortality after the intervention. We also considered if there was a relationship when intervention was made on vacation days or weekends. The results show that scarcity, studied as urgent interventions, and lack of focus, such as vacation days, increase mortality and costs of surgical interventions. Rainy days were found to be a factor that increases focus. Eventually, these results may allow proposing strategies that benefit physicians' performance, resource management, and treatment options, besides the psychological impact on patients, or even avoiding medical errors. Moreover, the same analysis could be applied to other jobs to increase productivity in the economy.