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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process and impact of patient involvement in locally defined improvement projects in two hospital clinics. The paper particularly aims to examine how patient narratives, in the form of diaries and radio montage, help to create new insights into patient experience for healthcare professionals, and support professionals’ enrolment and mobilisation in innovation projects.

Two case studies were undertaken. These drew upon qualitative interviews with staff and participant observation during innovation workshops. Patient diaries and a recorded montage of patient voices were also collected.

The findings illuminate translation processes in healthcare innovation and the emergence of meaning making process for staff through the active use of patient narratives. The paper highlights the critical role of meaning making as an enabler of patient-centred change processes in healthcare via: local clinic mangers defining problems and ideas; collecting and sharing patient narratives in innovation workshops; and healthcare professionals’ interpretation of patient narratives supporting new insights into patient experience.

This study demonstrates how healthcare professionals’ meaning making can be supported by articulating, constructing, listening and interpreting patient narratives. The two cases demonstrate how patient narratives serve as reflective devices for healthcare professionals.

This study presents a novel demonstration of the importance of patient narratives for translating healthcare innovation in a clinical practice setting.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it sets the context for the special issue by considering conceptions of patients and their roles in service delivery and improvement. Second, it introduces the contributions to the special issue, and identifies thematic resonance.

The paper utilises a literature synthesis and thematic analysis of the special issue submissions. These emanated from the Ninth International Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare Conference, hosted by Copenhagen Business School on behalf of the Learned Society for Studies in Organizing Healthcare.

The articles evidence a range of perspectives on patients’ roles in healthcare. These range from their being subject to, a mobilising focus for, and active participants in service delivery and improvement. Building upon the potential patient roles identified, this editorial develops five “ideal type” patient positions in healthcare delivery and improvement. These recognise that patients’ engagement with health care services is influenced both by personal characteristics and circumstances, which affect patients’ openness to engaging with health services, as well as the opportunities afforded to patients to engage, by organisations and their employees.

The paper explores the relationally embedded nature of patient involvement in healthcare, inherent in the interdependence between patient and providers’ roles. The typology aims to prompt discussion regarding the conceptualisation patients’ roles in healthcare organisations, and the individual, employee, organisational and contextual factors that may help and hinder their involvement in service delivery and improvement. The authors close by noting four areas meriting further research attention, and potentially useful theoretical lenses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how strategic, patient-centred communication plays a part in the discursive management of expectations posed to patients and healthcare organizations.

The paper provides an analysis of four documents collected as part of an ethnographic case study regarding “The Perspective of the Patient” – a Danish Hospital’s patient-centred communication programme. Mapping methods inspired by Grounded Theory are used to qualify the analysis.

The paper shows that strategic patient-centred communication addresses both a care-oriented approach to the patient and deploys market perceptions of patients. Market and care is seen as co-existing organizing modes that entail expectations to the patient. In the communication programme the patient is constructed in six information-seeking patient figures: affective patient; target group patient; citizen with rights; patient as a competent resource; user as active partner; and consumer. As a result, the patient-centred communication programme renders the patient as a flexible figure able to fit organizational demands of both care orientation and market concerns.

This study contributes to qualitative research in organizational health communication by combining two subfields – patient-centredness and health communication – in an empirical study of how market and care are intertwined in a patient-centred communication programme. The argument goes beyond the prevalent prescriptive approaches to patient-centredness and healthcare communication, instead providing a critical analytical perspective on strategic communication and patient-centredness and showing how expectations are posed to both patient and organization.

In literature, there is not agreement on the relevant data quality dimensions in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system context. The purpose of this paper is to provide some clarification of this topic, by answering two important questions: What are the most relevant dimensions for assessing ERP data quality? What are the causal relationships between these data quality dimensions?

Based on a discussion of existing literature on data quality, a classification model of ERP system data quality is proposed and the relationships between the defined categories of data quality dimensions are defined. The validity of the classification model and the relationships between categories of data quality dimensions are investigated in three case studies.

The three case studies confirm that the classification model captures the most important aspects of describing ERP data quality and that the defined causalities between categories of data quality dimensions correspond with practice.

Besides being relevant in an ERP system context, the contribution of this paper may also be applicable for the evaluation of data quality in other types of information systems.

The defined classification model of ERP system data quality may support companies in improving their ERP data quality, thereby achieving greater benefits from their ERP systems.

A clarification of the most important data quality aspects in an ERP context is provided. Furthermore, some of the most important causalities between categories of data quality are defined.

Many companies are part of parent‐subsidiary supply chains, i.e. organisations where a parent company receives products from its subsidiary or the other way around. Having this close relationship in a supply chain network opens the possibilities for different setups of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems across such companies. This paper clarifies the different ERP system strategies for companies in parent‐subsidiary supply chains and the consequences of choosing the different strategies.

In order to position the contributions of the paper, literature on the use of ERP systems in supply chain management (SCM) is investigated. Next, four archetypical ERP system setups across parent‐subsidiary supply chains are defined. The consequences of the four defined setups are deduced. Three case studies are presented to justify the relevance of the defined four ERP system strategies and to further investigate the consequences of choosing these (one case study represents two strategies).

The paper shows that there are significant impacts of choosing one of the four ERP system setups across parent‐subsidiary supply chains, e.g. quality of communication, degree of local management, synergy effects, etc. Furthermore, the paper shows that extant literature dealing with ERP systems and SCM fails to consider this aspect, which may at worst lead to incorrect generalisations.

The paper clarifies the importance of considering different ERP system setups in parent‐subsidiary relationships. Future research in ERP systems and SCM needs to focus more on this aspect.

The paper provides an improved basis for companies in parent‐subsidiary supply chains that are to implement ERP systems or are to rethink their current ERP strategy.

The definition of ERP system setups across parent‐subsidiary supply chains and the clarification of the consequences of these strategies represent new and useful contributions to the SCM and the ERP literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore different health care professionals’ discourse about privacy – its definition and importance in health care, and its role in their day-to-day work. Professionals’ discourse about privacy reveals how new technologies and laws challenge existing practices of information control within and between professional groups in health care, with implications not only for patient privacy, but also for the role of information control in professions more generally.

The authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with n=83 doctors, nurses, and health information professionals in two academic medical centers and one veteran’s administration hospital/clinic in the Northeastern USA. Interview responses were qualitatively coded for themes and patterns across groups were identified.

The health care providers and the authors studied actively sought to uphold the protection (and control) of patient information through professional ethics and practices, as well as through the use of technologies and compliance with legal regulations. They used discourses of professionalism, as well as of law and technology, to sometimes accept and sometimes resist changes to practice required in the changing technological and legal context of health care. The authors found differences across professional groups; for some, protection of patient information is part of core professional ethics, while for others it is simply part of their occupational work, aligned with organizational interests.

This qualitative study of physicians, nurses, and health information professionals revealed some differences in views and practices for protecting patient information in the changing technological and legal context of health care that suggest some professional groups (doctors) may be more likely to resist such changes and others (health information professionals) will actively adopt them.

New technologies and regulations are changing how information is used in health care delivery, challenging professional practices for the control of patient information that may change the value or meaning of medical records for different professional groups.

Qualitative findings suggest that professional groups in health care vary in the extent of information control they have, as well in how they view such control. Some groups may be more likely to (be able to) resist changes in the professional control of information that stem from new technologies or regulatory policies. Some professionals recognize that new IT systems and regulations challenge existing social control of information in health care, with the potential to undermine (or possibly bolster) professional self-control for some but not necessarily all occupational groups.

The potential for including patients in implementation processes has received limited attention in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the different roles adopted by 63 patients that emerged during and after four participatory quality improvement interventions, and the nature of their impact upon implementation processes and outcomes.

A cross-case ethnographic comparison of Experience-based Co-design in two clinical pathways in two UK NHS Trusts.

Two key themes emerge from the data. First, the authors found a range of different roles adopted by patients within and across the four projects; some were happy to share their experiences, others also helped to identify improvement priorities alongside staff whilst others were also involved in developing potential solutions with the staff who had cared for them. A few participants also helped implement those solutions and became “experts by experience” through engaging in the whole co-design process. Second, in terms of the impact of patient engagement with the co-design process whilst the changes championed by patients and carers were often small scale, as co-designers patients provided innovative ideas and solutions. Through their involvement and contributions they also acted as catalysts for broader change in the attitudes of staff by providing a motivation for wider organisational and attitudinal changes.

The research was conducted in two clinical pathways in two NHS trusts. However, the findings complement and add to the growing body of knowledge on experience based co-design.

Patient engagement is likely to require support and facilitation to ensure that patients can play a meaningful role as partners and co-designers in service improvement and implementation. Different roles suited particular individuals, with participants stepping in and out of the co-design process at various stages as suited their needs, capacities and (albeit sometimes perceptions re) skills. In this context, facilitation needs to be sensitive to individual needs and flexible to support involvement.

Patients and carers can play active roles in service improvement, particularly where the approach facilitate active engagement as co-designers.

Analysis of the role patients and carers in implementation and improvement.

Knowledge integration is the process of building shared mental models. The integration of the diverse knowledge of the health professions in shared mental models is a precondition for effective teamwork and team performance. As it is known that different groups of health care professionals often tend to work in isolation, the authors compared the perceptions of knowledge integration. It can be expected that based on this isolation, knowledge integration is assessed differently. The purpose of this paper is to test these differences in the perception of knowledge integration between the professional groups and to identify to what extent knowledge integration predicts perceptions of teamwork and team performance and to determine if teamwork has a mediating effect.

The study is a multi-center cross-sectional study with a descriptive-explorative design. Data were collected by means of a staff questionnaire for all health care professionals working in the rehabilitation clinics.

The results showed that there are significant differences in knowledge integration within interprofessional health care teams. Furthermore, it could be shown that knowledge integration is significantly related to patient-centered teamwork as well as to team performance. Mediation analysis revealed partial mediation of the effect of knowledge integration on team performance through teamwork.

In practice, the results of the study provide a valuable starting point for team development interventions.

This is the first study that explored knowledge integration in medical rehabilitation teams and its relation to patient-centered teamwork and team performance.