M (Maura) Leusder, MSc

Biography

My research focuses on cost and performance management in healthcare organizations. I use interpretive, qualitative methods to trace how new cost and performance management systems (e.g. time-driven activity-based costing) impact individuals in/and organizations. I co-create these systems with users, to critically study how they come to impact local routines, practices, and organisational outcomes. I publish the quantitative results in healthcare journals, and the qualitative/critical research in accounting, organization or management journals.

My doctoral work (2021-2025) focused on a cost management system in a fertility clinic and laboratory, using TDABC and process mining to build a patient-level performance dashboard. Throughout this project, we used these metrics to redesign care pathways in the clinic, which reduced the costs of delivering care to all patients, and which improved outcomes in terms of patient satisfaction and time to pregnancy. Here, I studied how clinicians experience costs by (for instance) considering planetary costs and strong desires to avoid waste, generate cost variation, and how impossible-to-value things like human embryos are assigned a value in practice. This project resulted in a number of publications and working papers.

My postdoctoral research (mid 2025-mid 2027) focuses the same topics, cost and performance management, in personalised gene therapies. Here, I am studying how activity-based costing systems are used to design an alternative future by making particular and highly valued activities visible and calculable.  

My research falls into two categories; healthcare services research focussed on the implementation of value-based healthcare, and theoretically driven research within the field of accounting.

I have published in a variety of journals and presented at top conferences, including Academy of Management (AOM), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA), European Academy of Management (EURAM), European Accounting Association annual congress, ISPOR (US/Boston), INFORMS Healthcare, European Health Management Association, etc. 
Throughout my PhD, I completed two research visits (Accounting research group, University of Innsbruck & Cancer Health Services research group, University of Melbourne). I also presented seminars at the University of Groningen (Accounting research group), University of Innbruck (Accounting research group), Melbourne (Cancer Health Services research), Nyenrode Business University, and the Strategy research group at RSM. 

Prior to my PhD, I completed my BSc. and MSc. (cum laude) at the Rotterdam School of Management, including two honors programs focussed on "grand challenges". This led me to focus on the "grand challenge" of rising healthcare costs in my research.