06/09/2026
Assistant Professor Minyoung Ku, Ph.D., of FSU’s Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration & Policy at Florida State University was the lead author of “Where do uninsured patients go? The paradox of collaborative network dynamics in interhospital transfers” published in Social Science & Medicine in May 2026, with fellow researchers FSU doctoral student Jinyoung Cha, and Arnold L. & Priscilla Moss Greenfield Endowed Professor Keon-Hyung Lee, Ph.D. The study examines the subtle ways that interhospital collaboration dynamics shape where patients are transferred, with a focus on differences across payer groups.
To study this topic, the team analyzed daily inpatient transfers among 159 general acute-care hospitals in Florida from 2018 through 2021, using Relational Event Modeling (REM), a method that captures how relationships between hospitals develop and change over time, to evaluate how the interhospital collaboration dynamics differed between insured and uninsured patients.
“My research helps to advance our understanding of how patient transfer systems work, from identifying empirical patterns of transfers to revealing the mechanisms behind them, bridging theoretical perspectives from multiple disciplines, including organization management, public policy, sociology, and public health,” Dr. Ku said. “Theoretically, the study also extends the discussion of the ‘dark sides’ of social capital and embeddedness into the domain of public value creation in healthcare, by showing that different stories may emerge when we look at seemingly well-operating systems from a different, more systemwide perspective.”
To learn more about the teams’ work, visit cosspp.fsu.edu/research-spotlight-minyoung-ku
