Hidden chaos factors inducing random walks which reduce hospital operative efficiency

Antonio Javier Rodríguez-Hernández; Carlos Sevcik

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262815

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 10, 2021
16 Oct 2021 Decision Letter - Sandra C. Buttigieg, Editor PONE-D-21-14891Hidden chaos factors inducing random walks whichreduce hospital operative efficiencyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sevcik, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 28 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. In the Methods section of your manuscript, please clearly indicate that a waiver for ethics approval was obtained from the hospital IRB institute. Please also ensure that you have include the full name of the ethics committee/institutional review board(s). 3. Please update your submission to use the PLOS LaTeX template. The template and more information on our requirements for LaTeX submissions can be found at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “All expenses were covered by Hospital La Fuenfría, Servicio Madrileño de salud (SERMAS). An non arbitered preliminary version of this article may be found in arXiv as http://export. arxiv.org/pdf/2011.09514. The authors thank Prof. Rafael Apitz for its critical reading of the manuscript an his comments which helped to increase its clarity” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “All funds were provided by Hospital La Fuenfría, Servicio Madrileño de Salud (SERMAS), Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The paper is very interesting and well structured. The analysis conducted is appropriate and well communicated. The implications of the findings are also clearly outlined. However, the paper needs proof reading due to typos or missing punctuation; e.g. page 8 line 18 - These shows; page 8 line 20 and page 7 line 7 missing commas; page 9 line 40 - ''such as described'' should read ''such as those described..'' Reviewer #2: The aim of the authors is to show that factors not usually considered in hospital performance analysis may have a huge impact on hospital efficacy - by delving into the case of La Fuenfrĺa Hospital. The methodology is explained in a way that enables replication and the discussion and conclusions triangulate with the rest of the paper. However, the paper has many typos and grammatical mistakes, which makes it a difficult read and sometimes understand. Even the abstract seems like a literal translation from the original language and does not flow well. I suggest an complete proof read and edit of the article by a native English speaking person. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Prof. Simon Grima [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262815.r001
Revision 1
15 Dec 2021 Author Response Journal Requirements. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLoS ONE's style r ..... . Reply: We did our best to comply. We used a published PLoS article to reproduce its form information fields an and style. Not all the features were available in tha LaTeX remplate, but we hope that any shortcomings will be easily solved for your typesetters. Also, most journal use and require authos supplied Key Words, we added a small section with keywords to the manuscript, if this is unsuitable it will be trivial for your typesetters to comment or erase the Key Words section which is all in one line. 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reply: No reply seems necessary. 3. Please update your submission to use the PLoS LaTeX template. ... , Reply: Done as suggested. This implied a long time modifying each of the entries of our database to conform to PloS ONE uses on doi numbers and url links. It took a long time since the BibTeX dbase contains 3315 entries and it most conform to the ABS book format we use for a book citif 847 references, thus far.It was a lot of work. Perhaps the most important of our references (Sevcik, 1998) appeared in an on line journal , Complexity International, which is no longer available. Ten years ago we deposited a copy of Sevcik 1998 in arXiv, in a manner that complies with the extinct Complexity International Journal copyrights. The link to the arXiv file MUST be on the citation of this work, thus we had to tweak the citation to make the arXiv ling visible even using PLoS One bibliography style. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: Reply: The information was set in the LaTeX template. It was divided into sections as done, for example in https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258052 which we use as styling example. 5. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. ... Reply: Our references are stored in an extense BibTeX formatted data base used in all our publications. However, we have to modify the fields thr references in our BiBTrX dbase to accommodate to PloS One bibliography style without destroying the references format for other uses.Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reply: No reply seems necessary. 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reply: No reply seems necessary. 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? Reply: We are unsure about the meaning of the YES choice by the reviewerss. It could mean in the context of the question that we did it right in the manuscript, or that we should include more. In any case we are including two MS Exel-formatted files with the original La Fuenfría Hospital data. The manuscript, we feel, it is clear on how was the data used and corrected for a short breech of missing data. In any event, we are open to any questions from the readers. The original HLF spreadsheets provided have Spanish labels and headings, but each of these may be easily translated to any language using Google Translate ® for example. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? Reply: As pointed out by Reviewer 2, there were some typos in the paper. We revised once more, but since our capacity to detect mistakes in our papers decreases as we re- read them, we hired a professional proofreader. We hope that now the issues are fixed. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No 5. Review Comments to the Author. Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. Reviewer #1: The paper is very interesting and well structured. The analysis conducted is appropriate and well communicated. The implications of the findings are also clearly outlined. However, the paper needs proof reading due to typos or missing punctuation; e.g. page 8 line 18 - These shows; page 8 line 20 and page 7 line 7 missing commas; page 9 line 40 - ''such as described'' should read ''such as those described..'' Reply: Thanks for your kind opinion. The revised version will be proof read by a certified professional English proofreader. Prior to this, we re-read the manuscript and corrected the typos we were able to see. Reviewer #2: The aim of the authors is to show that factors not usually considered in hospital performance analysis may have a huge impact on hospital efficacy - by delving into the case of La Fuenfría Hospital. The methodology is explained in a way that enables replication and the discussion and conclusions triangulate with the rest of the paper. However, the paper has many typos and grammatical mistakes, which makes it a difficult read and sometimes understand. Even the abstract seems like a literal translation from the original language and does not flow well. I suggest an complete proof read and edit of the article by a native English speaking person. 6. PLoS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy . Reply: We appreciate Prof. Grima openness. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: Prof. Simon Grima Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Reply to reviewers comments.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262815.r002
6 Jan 2022 Decision Letter - Sandra C. Buttigieg, Editor Hidden chaos factors inducing random walks which reduce hospital operative efficiency PONE-D-21-14891R1 Dear Dr. Sevcik, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Sandra C. Buttigieg, MD PhD FFPH Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I believe that the current version is suitable for publication. All comments raised by the reviewers have been addressed. Reviewer #2: The author has successfully addressed the issues identified in a the first review wherein I had suggested minor review. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Simon Grima https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262815.r003
Formally Accepted
17 Jan 2022 Acceptance Letter - Sandra C. Buttigieg, Editor PONE-D-21-14891R1 Hidden chaos factors inducing random walks which reduce hospital operative efficiency. Dear Dr. Sevcik: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Sandra C. Buttigieg Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262815.r004

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