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This study aims to apply the Delphi method to explore the possibilities for implementing agility management concepts in Slovenian health-care organisations.

The research is based on a qualitative Delphi study encompassing 15 employees in different Slovenian health-care organisations.

Slovenian health-care organisations need to be more agile currently. For this reason, it is necessary to begin with organisational changes and organisational learning concepts to educate employees about the meaning and content of agile processes. It is essential to ensure that accepting employee mistakes and offering help to employees becomes normal practice, and it is necessary to ensure the greater trust of the management towards the employees.

The research empowers health-care professionals with new management and leadership concepts, such as agile management, sustainable leadership and leadership development methods in health care.

Reports that the US health care system has been shifting since the 1960s to a competitive environment with many new and innovative organizational forms. Describes the nature of the competitive environment for health care and some of the basic forms of the new organizational arrangements. Explores some of the implications for managing successful health care organizations by the understanding of interorganizational linkages in the health care industry and a partnership approach to marketing and management.

This paper aims to “identify,” “analyse” and “categorise” the readiness factors of lean sustainability in health-care organisation using total interpretive structural modelling (TISM).

To obtain the data, a closed-ended questionnaire was used in addition to a scheduled interview. To identify how the factors interact, the TISM approach was used, and the matriced’ impacts croise’s multiplication applique’e a UN classement (MICMAC) analysis was used to rank and categorise the lean sustainability readiness factors.

This study identified ten lean sustainability readiness factors for health-care organisation. The identified factors are resources utilization practice (F1), management commitment and leadership (F2), operational flexibility (F3), workforce engagement and time commitment (F4), sustainability motivational factors (F5), awareness of lean and sustainable practice (F6), hospital design (F7), energy efficiency practices in hospitals (F8), responsible autonomy (F9) and new system adoptability training (F10). The key/driving factors are identified in this study are operational flexibility, sustainability motivational factors, management commitment and leadership, new system adoptability training.

The study focussed primarily on lean sustainability factors for the health-care sector.

This research will aid key stakeholders and academics in the better understanding the readiness factors that influence lean sustainability in health-care organisation. This study emphasises the factors that must be considered when applying lean sustainable practices in health care as a real-world application in a health-care organisation. These readiness factors for lean sustainability can be used by an organization to comprehend more about the concept and the components that contribute to health-care lean sustainability.

This study proposes the TISM technique for health care, which is a novel attempt in the subject of lean sustainability in this sector.

This study aims to explore how knowledge management (KM) influences the intellectual capital (IC) of organizations operating in health care and how IC and knowledge-sharing (KS) can contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in health systems. Notably, this study focuses on telemedicine, investigating how relational capital contributes to KS in the context of remote care services.

To comply with the paper’s aim, the authors use a qualitative research method based on a polar case study suitable for IC in health-care studies. More precisely, this study analyzes a nonprofit organization that, for over 15 years, has offered a free multispecialist teleconsultation service to answer medical questions from the most disadvantaged places in the world.

The findings show that the KM significantly contributes to the IC of organizations. Indeed, it improves the data management and transmission system, it increases performance flexibility in times of resource scarcity without compromising business objectives and it can attract new human resources even when not motivated by selfish goals (volunteer physicians).

This research contributes to studies on IC in health care by focusing on the contribution of telemedicine to the creation of IC. In particular, this work emphasizes the ability of telemedicine to develop and share knowledge in disadvantaged areas of the world. Moreover, in the current context, still strongly permeated by the health emergency generated by the pandemic and recently by the war in Eastern Europe, the importance of such assistance and diagnosis grows.

The conclusions the research findings lead may guide policymakers toward a policy supporting telemedicine. It would alleviate general health-care costs and completely revolutionize light health care’s role. Moreover, reducing socioeconomic distances, improving access to care and applying innovative technologies for sharing outcomes foster balanced socioeconomic development and knowledge dissemination.

This research has shown how telemedicine represents a new successful business model even in times of crisis. The organizational model makes it possible to offer cutting-edge specialized care, contain costs, easily reach disadvantaged areas of the planet, strengthen the skills and autonomy of the most backward countries through a process of KS and push the structures operating there to interact with those in advanced countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the complexity of the network governance setting affects accountability practices. The authors pay particular attention to the organizational characteristics that may enable a common understanding of multiple accountability relationships, or lead to problems in reconciling competing forms of accountability, thereby appearing as blame game-type behavior.

The authors conducted a case study with 31 semi-structured interviews in a Finnish health care organization (FHC) that offers basic public health care services. The organization represents a co-operative arrangement with the main city and three smaller municipalities. The FHC has faced difficulties in balancing budget constraints with the provision of statutory care to citizens. This case is analyzed with the help of theories relating to accountability, the blame game, and dialogue.

The authors found that in the FHC operating under austerity constraints, attempts to reconcile financial, professional, and democratic accountability were made but, instead of dialogue and consensus, the different stakeholder groups resorted to defensive tactics in order to protect their resources, position, or sense of professional obligation. The authors suggest that in a context of network governance, accompanied by an increasing emphasis on financial accountability, organizational practices are susceptible to conflicting accountabilities and behavior characterized in this paper as a blame game.

The study contributes to the empirical studies on accountability in the new public governance context by analyzing the complex accountability relations between stakeholder groups with different agendas. The authors suggest organizational characteristics that may exacerbate conflicts between different stakeholder groups and prevent constructive dialogue. Furthermore, the study analyzes the composition of democratic accountability within the studied organization.

Numerous and diverse organizations have implemented lean principles and practices, which concentrate on improving the efficiency of business processes by reducing cost, waste, consumptions and effort. However, previous assessments have not focused on the leanness of the supply chain in a health-care setting. This paper aims to introduce a method for assessing the successful implementation of lean principles and tools in a supply chain. Furthermore, this paper validates the method in a health-care organization.

This paper starts with an extensive literature review on assessing leanness and using multi-grade fuzzy logic. Then, a conceptual model was developed to measure leanness. The conceptual model was validated by discussing the initial version with select academic experts, especially those who deal with leanness in health-care organizations. After responding to the experts’ valuable comments, the health-care organization that is the focus of this case study was chosen based on two criteria. The first criterion was the organization’s ability to participate in the study, and the second was the organization’s commitment to implementing lean principles. These criteria were important to ensure the organization had the necessary foundation for implementing change initiatives such as lean process improvements. Next, a multi-grade (multi-attributes) fuzzy logic was used for leanness measurement. A leanness index was calculated, and the results were validated using experts from the case study organization. Finally, the weaker areas of the organization’s processes were identified to point the way for further improvements.

The assessment indicated that the case study organization is not lean. The organization’s weaker attributes were identified, and improvements have been suggested.

This study focused on a single health-care organization, which was selected from a limited pool of potential organizations, namely, organizations which are accredited by both the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions and the Joint Commission International. The scope of future research should be extended to multi-case studies to enhance the findings presented in this paper. This paper’s findings can be used to help decision-makers at health-care providers to implement lean thinking in supply chain processes.

This research may be interest to practicing supply chain managers, as it proposes what enablers, factors and attributes should be emphasized in lean implementation. The proposed model can work as an assessment tool to identify the gap between the present level of leanness and the desired leanness state so the health-care organization can identify what can be improved. This model enables decision-makers in hospital supply chain to take suitable actions for improving lean implementation level.

This study makes an original contribution to the body of research concerning lean principles; the study developed a conceptual model for leanness assessment that can be applied to the supply chain of health-care organizations. Indeed, the conceptual model is likely to be useful for assessing leanness outside of the health-care field, which suggests avenues for future research.

Improving the performance of health care organizations is now perceived as essential in order to better address the needs of the populations and respect their ability to pay for the services. There is no consensus on what is performance. It is increasingly considered as the optimal execution of four functions that every organization must achieve in order to survive and develop: reach goals; adapt to its environment; produce goods or services and maintain values; and a satisfying organizational climate. There is also no consensus on strategies to improve this performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper intends to analyze the performance of primary health care organizations from the perspective of Kauffman’s model. It mainly aims to understand the often contradictory, paradoxical and unexpected results that emerge from studies on this topic.

To do so, the first section briefly presents Kauffman’s model and lays forward its principal components. The second section presents three studies on the performance of primary organizations and brings out the contradictory, paradoxical and unexpected results they obtained. The third section explains these results in the light of Kauffman’s model.

Kauffman’s model helps give meaning to the results of researches on performance of primary health care organizations that were qualified as paradoxical or unexpected. The performance of primary health care organizations then cannot be understood by only taking into account the characteristics of these organizations. The complexity of the environments in which they operate must simultaneously be taken into account. This paper brings original development of an integrated view of the performance of organizations, their own characteristics and those of the local environment in which they operated.

This paper aims to gain insights about information management practices in public health-care organizations in Kuwait and offer recommendations to improve these practices.

This study involves secondary analysis of quantitative and qualitative accreditation-related data pertaining to the compliance with the Information Management standard at seven public tertiary health-care facilities over two accreditation cycles.

Overall, organizations improved their compliance with the Information Management standard. However, issues exist with effectively and efficiently transmitting data, aggregating clinical and administrative data and using the information for both strategic planning and quality improvement initiatives.

The analysed data set does not provide information about the improvements done between the accreditation cycles. Caution should be applied before assuming generalizability of the results, considering the context and social constructs around the health-care system is essential.

Compliance with predetermined criteria through accreditation can improve information management practices. Without proper management of information at health-care facilities, achieving safe and effective patient care is futile. The role of health information technology (IT) should not be sidelined; robust health IT solutions can help support good information management practices thereby improving care quality and aiding health-care reform.

Concerning information management, health-care organizations providing focused services have clear advantages over organizations providing general care services. Considering the type of care organization (general vs specialized) can provide insights into how information management practices can affect the operations of the organization.

Investigates the relationships between organizational adoption and extent of use of quality management (QM) programs and customer relationship management systems (CRM) in health‐care and non‐health‐care organizational settings. In referring to QM, recognizes that there has been widespread adoption, across organizations generally, of programs aimed at delivering superior quality to the customer. Focuses on this group of programs when considering QM, and looks at how adoption of QM may impact the CRM programs. Specifically, contends that organizations from the two settings may vary considerably in QM maturity. Begins by considering whether there are differences in the paths which health‐care and non‐health‐care organizations have used in approaching and implementing QM. Finds no differences, however, in this research. Instead, finds that there were systematic changes which appeared to accompany higher‐quality QM implementations in both health‐care and non‐health‐care organizations.

The introduction of regulated competition in health care in several Western countries confronts health care providing organizations with changing relationships, with their environment and a need for knowledge and skills to analyse and improve their market position. Marketing receives more and more attention, as recent developments in this field of study provide a specific perspective on the relationships between an organization and external and internal parties. In doing so, a basis is offered for network management. A problem is that the existing marketing literature is not entirely appropriate for the specific characteristics of health care. After a description of the developments in marketing and its most recent key concepts, the applicability of these concepts in health‐care organizations is discussed. States that for the health‐care sector, dominated by complex networks of interorganizational relationships, the strategic marketing vision on relationships can be very useful. At the same time however, the operationalization of these concepts requires special attention and a distinct role of the management of health‐care organizations, because of the characteristics of such organizations and the specific type of their service delivery.