Clinicians’ Emotions and TeleStroke Use

Telemedicine has been available and in use for over fifty years yet by most accounts it has fallen short of its promised impact on healthcare. While legal and reimbursement issues continue to plague the spread of telemedicine use, the technology has continued to improve. We feel there are additional dimensions that play a key role in the use of telemedicine; in particular, we believe that doctors’ and nurses’’ emotional state during use of a telemedicine system has a significant impact on how telemedicine is used. What are the main drivers that give rise to these emotions? How do they impact the use of telemedicine? What changes in the business process can mitigate the negative impact of these emotions? We investigate these research questions by conducting an embedded case study utilizing interview data and archival documents to gain insight into the emotional components at play during TeleStroke consultations

Mining Data to Catch Tax Cheats

This teaching case covers technical and non-technical concerns about data mining enabled by the creation of a data warehouse by the California Franchise Tax Board (CFTB). CFTB used data mining to analyze data collected from federal, state and municipal agencies and other organizations to identify residents who under-report income or fail to file tax returns. The case presents different stakeholders’ privacy, financial, technical and political concerns regarding the use of data obtained from an array of sources. The case is aimed at an undergraduate or MBA/MS course on IS Management, Data Management/Warehousing or Information Privacy. It could also be used to study IT and public policy, or E-government. It provides an opportunity for students to consider how social and political factors interact with technical challenges in inter-enterprise relationships. It also offers an opportunity to consider the value of data in relation to both the financial and non-financial costs of obtaining it

An Agile IT-Enabled Social Startup

In an IT-enabled hybrid social startup, how and why does the social entrepreneur respond to conflicting commercial versus social norms and practices, as well as IT innovation challenges? We conducted an exploratory single-case study of an IT-enabled hybrid social startup consisting of a charitable pharmacy, two non-profit consortia, and two for-profit IT businesses, all co-founded by a pharmacist/social entrepreneur (with partners) who aimed to distribute donated “wasted” medications to needy patients. The two for-profit organizations were designing a blockchain and complementary web and mobile applications for secure, cost-effective donated-drug distribution, for use by this entrepreneur’s charitable pharmacy and other organizations committed to matching donors with needy patients. Study findings suggests that multiple forms of IT agility, multiple forms of business agility, and a unique form of social-commercial agility help an IT-enabled hybrid social startup persist, despite financial and other challenges

Studying Complex IT Challenges? Discuss Real Cases

Field-based case studies are uniquely suited to exploring the complex challenges of digital transformation. We propose that real discussion cases (developed from rigorously-researched field-based case studies) can trigger useful discourse that helps scholars improve theories addressing complex digital transformation challenges. To advance this argument we undertook an extreme-case study to examine the practices and theoretical contributions of an exceptionally impactful researcher in a non- IT domain (Sumantra Ghoshal, an international management scholar who conducted many field- base case studies and produced many real discussion cases). Based on our extreme-case study findings we consider implications for research on digital transformation

Seven C’s of Information Security

The 1991 United States Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (updated in 2004) describes legal requirements for organizations’ ethical business procedures. We adapt this framework for the purpose of developing a high-level “Seven C’s” framework for ethically-responsible information security (InfoSec) procedures. Informed by the Resource Based View (RBV) of strategic management, we analyze case studies of two organizations to demonstrate the adapted guidelines’ applicability. Each organization has a well-established InfoSec program, yet each requires further development according to guidelines in our Seven C’s model. We discuss implications for InfoSec policies and standards

Controls in the NICU

Medication dosage errors cause too many adverse clinical events in both inpatient and outpatient settings. In this disguised and partially fictionalized teaching case a hospital administrator considers whether the skills she recently acquired in an MBA Accounting Information System class could be adapted for use in a quality improvement program related to medication errors. The case illustrates how the preparation of a system flowchart mapped to a control matrix – a technique that auditors commonly use to support analysis of the adequacy of controls over financial processes – can be adapted to support analysis of clinical process controls and controls over related information. The case offers an opportunity for students to discuss some of the benefits and limitations of this technique, and possible extensions of it to non-financial processes in health care and elsewhere

Student, Interrupted: Can Digital Badging Improve Programmatic Agility and Help IS Students During Crises?

We propose that a stackable badged micro-credential system could increase academic programmatic agility, in turn helping university students cope with personal crises (illness, accidents, family emergencies), and societal-level crises (pandemics, natural disasters, geopolitical events). We demonstrate how our proposed system would certify students’ mastery of several modules comprising a required graduate-level Strategic IS Management course. This proposed system will provide helpful structure (through a modular design and reliance on well-accepted faculty governance, including the traditional college registrar role), and temporal flexibility (enabling students to receive credit for course modules taken in different terms/semesters, and taught by the same or different instructors) and portability (given that micro-credentials provide valid evidence of specific skills or knowledge a student has acquired, regardless of learning modality or instructor). This stackable badged micro-credential system would help students during crises, by making it easy for them to temporarily drop out of a course when circumstances impede effective learning and making it easy for them to resume studies when they are ready and able to do so. We discuss technical challenges that university administrators may face in implementing micro-credentialing in IS classes, offer suggestions for pilot-testing the proposed system, and suggest possible future extensions of this idea

Investigating the Emotional Context of Pediatric Critical Care Telemedicine Consultations

Patient-present physician-to-physician telemedicine consultations have been shown to be effective, yet diffusion is not widespread. While much prior research has investigated how computer anxiety affects acceptance and usage of telemedicine and other systems, few prior studies have addressed the impact of situational anxiety (e.g., anxiety caused by the stress of treating a critically-ill child under time pressure) or other emotions on telemedicine acceptance and ongoing use. We report on findings from an embedded-cases study of four hospitals that participate in a telemedicine consultation service provided by a rural tertiary-care hospital. Interviews revealed that telemedicine can help clinicians cope with emotions such as anxiety, grief, and anger that arise from the high-stakes pediatric critical care context. Study findings point to design principles for telemedicine and for collaborative systems in other domains, in and beyond health care

Assessing Risks in Two Projects: A Strategic Opportunity and a Necessary Evil

McFarlan\u27s IT Project Risk Assessment Framework (Applegate, et al., 1996), identifies three main areas of IT project risk: project size, project structure, and technology familiarity. According to this framework, if two IT projects are of similar size, a project which is designed primarily around emerging technologies will entail significantly higher risks than a project which is designed primarily around traditional technologies. This paper analyzes two comparably-sized IT projects. One - a telemedicine initiative at Fletcher-Allen Health Care in Vermont -- is designed primarily around emerging technologies. The other - the year 2000 compliance program at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) - is focused primarily on fixing and testing existing systems on traditional platforms. Our assessment identified two additional salient criteria which, when applied to the two projects revealed higher risks at the MTA. These criteria are time constraints (i.e., the immovable deadline of the year 2000) and system interdependence (i.e., the need for applications to share data with other applications, both within the MTA and with numerous external parties). When these two factors are taken into account, it becomes evident that Year 2000 initiatives represent far higher project risks than the emerging technology projects that are considered to be on the bleeding edge

THE ECOLOGY OF INTERORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION SHARING

Increasingly, companies use interorganizational information systems to support business process partnerships, such as automatic replenishment systems and other supply chain initiatives, invoicing and payments, and insurance claims processing. Inter-firm networking in turn can increase the visibility of information generated and used by business partners. These business partners may experience intended and unintended impacts from the changes in the partnering relationship, in effect altering the ecology of the organization. Yet IT researchers rarely study an organization’s ecology, focusing instead on impacts upon internal processes. Our goal in this paper is to propose a definition of interorganizational information ecology, to provide IT researchers with a lens through which interorganizational information sharing should be studied. We begin by reviewing principles of ecology from the natural and social sciences and then discuss the emergence of principles of organizational ecology and information ecology within the management literature. We then argue that advances in information technology have been a primary enabler for companies’ focus on interorganizational business processes and that field research on IT-enabled business partnerships must include the impacts upon each partner and the information shared among them. An example from health care demonstrates the usefulness of the concept, and we conclude with suggestions for field-based research on the ecology of interorganizational information sharing