Hospital Leadership in Support of Digital Transformation

Evolving customer expectations and the rapid introduction of new information technologies are influencing business operations, and businesses need to transform themselves with new operating models to remain competitive. The traditional top-down administrative leadership approach is not sufficiently flexible to support the innovation needed to sustain customer engagement and retention. There is a need for both an enabling leadership that supports the exploration of innovative ideas quickly for viability and an adaptive leadership to transition the ideas that show promise into the current business model or a variation of this model to sustain growth. We define digital leadership as a strategic process that collectively uses these three leadership styles to create an ecosystem that advances a culture of innovation within organizations. This leadership process uses four foundational platforms to support business transformations: (1) An innovation platform to empower teams to explore ideas that create value using digital transformations; (2) An agile system and business platform to quickly design and deliver IT implementations; (3) A learning platform to support reflective discourse that leads to organizational capacity building; and (4) An adoption platform to decide when and what implementations get transitioned to the regular business for sustaining competitiveness. We will illustrate how digital leadership is used to transform the culture of a community hospital through several IS implementations recognized by external peers for their innovativeness. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol10/iss3/1

Using Visualization to Build Transparency in a Healthcare Blockchain Application

With patients demanding services to control their own health conditions, hospitals are looking to build agility in delivering care by extending their reach into patient and partner ecosystems and sharing relevant patient data to support care continuity. However, sharing patient data with several external stakeholders outside a hospital network calls for the development of a digital platform that is trusted by both hospitals and stakeholders, given that there is often no single entity supporting such coordination. In this paper, we propose a methodology that uses a blockchain architecture to address the technical challenge of linking disparate systems used by multiple stakeholders and the social challenge of engendering trust by using visualization to bring about transparency in the way in which data are shared. We illustrate this methodology using a pilot implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion and directions for future research and makes some concluding comments.This study has been partially funded by the ECLIPSE-UA project (RTI2018-094283-B-C32)

The Role of IT and Organizational Capabilities on Digital Business Value

The opportunities and threats that digital technologies like SMACIT (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things) bring to organizations are increasingly being explored by the academia and industry. Organizations face the challenge not only to use new technologies but to gain competitive advantage from such embracement in order to stay relevant in the market. This study aims to provide practical insights on how Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can prepare to embrace Digital Technologies. For this, it proposes that a combination of both IT and Organizational capabilities can be the foundation for achieving Business Value with Digital Technologies or “Digital Business Value”. IT capabilities are evaluated by the IT capability maturity framework (IT-CMF) and Organizational Intelligence Quotient (Mendelson and Pillai, 1999) is used to evaluate organizational capabilities. Digital Business Value is defined as the achievement of business objectives using Digital Technologies (Riera & Iijima, 2017). The target population was one hundred Japanese SMEs which were awarded by The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry due to their effective utilization of IT supporting business performance in the list of “Competitive IT Strategy SME Selection 100” over the years 2015, 2016 and 2017. Data collection was done with questionnaires sent to all the awarded organizations and collected 34 responses. A quantitative approach was used and the data analysis was done with correlation and regression analysis. Empirical evidence demonstrated that IT and Organizational capabilities are linked to Digital Business Value. A subset of IT capabilities like Risk Management, Business Planning among others was indeed related to Digital Business Value. In addition, Internal Knowledge Dissemination and Continuous Innovation dimensions from Organizational IQ showed relationship with Digital Business Value. This study unveiled that the combination of IT and Organizational capabilities leverage the value from Digital technologies. The outcomes from this study may be of reference to SMEs that look to embrace Digital Technologies as it shows which particular capabilities may be of interest for developing. This study extends the Digital Transformation literature in particular how dynamic capabilities work together in order to enable Digital Business Value. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol11/iss2/4

Knowledge Profile in PAJAIS: A Review of Literature and Future Research Directions

It is our pleasure and honor to be the Editor-in-Chief of the Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems (PAJAIS). After cultivating over a decade, PAJAIS has become an important platform for researchers to share their high-quality papers. The mission of PAJAIS is to be a leading IS journal. Although the journal intends to have close ties with the communities in Asia Pacific regions, it is an open platform that welcomes submissions on any IS-related topics from authors around the world. In order to provide readers with a better understanding of the profile of PAJAIS, this editorial is the first in the series to summarize what has been published. Our founding editor, Prof. Ting-Peng Liang, and I started this series with a discussion of the publications in PAJAIS

How Do You Perpetuate IT-Enabled Change When Top Management Participation and Involvement Diminish?

Background: Research has demonstrated that sustained top management participation and involvement are important for IT-enabled change. However, this is not always possible. How IT-enabled change can succeed when top management participation and involvement diminish is an unsolved, but important research question. Method: We perform a 5-year exploratory longitudinal case study. Results: Our data is presented in two parts. We first present the contextual elements (goals, people, structures/processes, and artifacts) during the two years top management was actively participating and involved. For the three-year period where top management participation and involvement diminished, we present the contextual elements, and middle management’s enactment of traditional middle management roles (information broker, mediator, facilitator, change agent) on three kinds of threats to the change (deviations from change vision, emergent issues, involving new stakeholders). Conclusions: We find IT-enabled change can succeed when top management participation and involvement diminish if middle management engages in joint action, i.e., intentional collective activity where members consciously choose to coordinate to achieve a goal. We identify three kinds of joint action: Constraining, where actions of the group limit the ability of individual middle managers to deviate from shared goals, Enabling, whereby a group of middle managers adapt the project to changing circumstances, and Extending, where groups of middle managers engage with others not in their functional areas. Joint action emerges when top management embeds, in the project context, (1) key influential stakeholders who are involved in the change, (2) a common goal, (3) structures and processes that promote collective work, and (4) artifacts inscribed with the common goal and collective work. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol11/iss4/2

(In)sucesso da telessaúde: Fatores que influenciam o processo de implementação e normalização nas organizações de saúde

A telessaúde tem sido uma estratégia utilizada para combater alguns desafios a que os sistemas de saúde têm sido sujeitos, mas a sua implementação bem-sucedida na rotina dos profissionais de saúde continua a ser influenciada por múltiplos fatores. Torna-se essencial que os gestores das organizações de saúde recorram a instrumentos fiáveis que permitam identificar, caracterizar e explicar os mecanismos que motivam o processo de implementação e afetam os resultados da telessaúde. Com o objetivo de identificar os fatores que influenciam a implementação da telessaúde sob a perspetiva dos profissionais de saúde, desenvolveu-se um questionário online na plataforma Google Forms, com base na versão inglesa do instrumento NoMAD. Foram recolhidas 131 respostas válidas (M=95 e H=36). Os utilizadores cobrem um intervalo de idades, anos de experiência, contextos e profissões bastante vasto. Apenas 31 profissionais utilizam a telessaúde. O domínio da ação coletiva apresenta a média geral mais baixa (M=3,41) e o domínio da participação cognitiva a média mais elevada (M=4,08). Não existem diferenças significativas dos domínios entre os diferentes grupos profissionais e contextos (p>0,05), mas são significativas para a função desempenhada na telessaúde (p<0,05) e para diferentes anos de experiência (p<0,01). Não foi identificado nenhum domínio responsável pelo insucesso da implementação da telessaúde na rotina diária dos profissionais. Estes reconhecem o valor deste serviço, mas apontam falhas na formação, desenvolvimento de competências, recursos disponíveis, liderança e envolvimento organizacional como fatores que levam a uma normalização menos positiva da telessaúde na prática diária.Telehealth has been one strategy to counteract some of the challenges that health systems face, but its successful implementation into health professionals’ patterns of work continues to be shaped by multiple factors. It is essential that managers of health care organizations use reliable implementation instruments for the identification, characterization, and explanation of the mechanisms that motivate the implementation processes and affect telehealth results. In order to identify the factors that influence the implementation of telehealth from the perspective of health professionals, an online questionnaire was developed on Google Forms, based on the English version of NoMAD. 131 valid responses were collected (F=95 and M=36). Users cover a very wide range of ages, professions, years of experience and contexts. Only 31 practitioners use telehealth. The collective action domain has the lowest overall mean (M=3.41) and the cognitive participation domain the highest mean (M=4.08). There are no significant differences in domains among different professional groups and contexts (p>0.05), but they are significant for the role on telehealth (p<0.05) and for different years of experience (p<0.01). No domain was identified as being responsible for the unsuccessful implementation of telehealth in the professionals’ daily routine. Practitioners recognize the value of this service, but point to training, available resources, development and organizational practice as factors that lead to a less positive normalization of telehealth in daily practice

Predictors of Radio Frequency Identification Adoption for Medication Administration in Hospitals

Medication administration challenges within the United States hospital system have led to adverse drug events from medication errors among patients, resulting in 1.3 million emergency room visits and 350,000 hospitalizations annually. Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been identified as a useful tool within hospital systems; however, this technology has been slow to be incorporated to manage medication administration processes, necessitating exploration of predicting factors of RFID adoption. This quantitative, cross-sectional study explored the contributing factors of United States hospital’s adoption of RFID for medication administration using the technology-organization-environment framework as a foundation and secondary data from the Health Information Management Systems Society’s survey of United States hospitals. A binary regression analysis was used to explore the relationships between technological (RFID interoperability, networked environment, and vendor selection), organizational (hospital size, financial status, and presence of a chief information officer), and environmental (presence of an Electronic Medical Record and the attainment of Health Information and Management Systems Society Stage 6) factors as predictors of RFID adoption for medication administration. The results of this study found an association between RFID interoperability and either no association or the inability to determine a relationship between the remaining variables and RFID adoption for medication administration. This research contributes and supports social change research as it provides information for hospital leaders exploring best practices for improving medication administration in hospitals via technological solutions