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Digital transformation is one of the key concepts attached to the smart cities’ domain. The requirement to enhance strategically the way that business is delivered around different areas is a critical milestone for the digital transformation agenda and also for business performance management. In this short position chapter, we are focusing on the area of healthcare and we are providing key insights and lessons learned from Saudi Arabia. The main contribution of the chapter is a structured discussion on a digital healthcare strategy in the context of smart cities.

Workplace voice is well-established and encompasses behaviors such as prosocial voice, informal complaints, grievance filing, and whistleblowing, and it focuses on interactions between the employee and supervisor or the employee and the organizational collective. In contrast, our chapter focuses on employee prosocial advocacy voice (PAV), which the authors define as prosocial voice behaviors aimed at preventing harm or promoting constructive changes by advocating on behalf of others. In the context of a healthcare organization, low quality and unsafe patient care are salient and objectionable states in which voice can motivate actions on behalf of the patient to improve information exchanges, governance, and outreach activities for safer outcomes. The authors draw from the theory and research on responsibility to intersect with theories on information processing, accountability, and stakeholders that operate through voice between the employee-patient, employee-coworker, and employee-profession, respectively, to propose a model of PAV in patient-centered healthcare. The authors complete the model by suggesting intervening influences and barriers to PAV that may affect patient-centered outcomes.

Performance metrics have become widely used and much lamented – about tools for measuring healthcare quality. In this paper, the authors reflect on the development and use of performance metrics in healthcare regulation and clinical practice. Studying multi-actor settings of performance measurement systems in healthcare in Sweden and the Netherlands, the authors show how regulatory agencies (i.e., the inspectorate and national registries), patients, hospitals, and practitioners engage in the constitution of healthcare practices through developing performance indicators that form the input for ranking, ensuing intensive dialogues on what should be measured and accounted for, and to what effects. The authors analyze this process as caring for numbers. The authors discern two practices of caring for numbers: validating and contexting. Validating refers to the practices of making numbers reflect those practices they intend to depict; contexting is about how with the use of numbers specific contexts of healthcare are built. These processes together emphasize the performative character of numbers as well as the reflexive uses of performativity. The paper shows how collaborative and rather pragmatic practices of caring for numbers co-construct specific practices of healthcare. Though this reflexive entanglement of production and use of numbers actors not only constitute specific performance metrics and ranking practices but also perform healthcare.

The Canadian healthcare system is recognized as one of the best health systems in the world. However, recent social and economic conditions have placed significant pressure on system administrators to demonstrate value-for-money for the investments made with an increased scrutiny on service delivery and cost structures. Challenges in providing more efficient healthcare often resonate two key constraints: the shortage of overall funding and barriers to accessing appropriate service providers in a timely fashion. The most common solution is simply to increase service provider manpower and invest further financial resources.

In Ontario, Canada’s largest province, The Shoulder Centre (TSC) has introduced a transformative solution to address system constraints through the development of an innovative and comprehensive model of care which builds on (1) novel partnerships between community providers and the Centre’s clinical team, (2) A Patient-Centered Specialty Practice (PCSP) and (3) Leveraging technology solutions.

TSC’s model of care suggests that many challenges in healthcare are attributed to the inappropriate management of human capital and the under-development of social capital. As a solution, TSC has transformed the organizational structure of its health services by converting service providers into partners with shared accountabilities, resulting in economic value through human capital optimization and improved system efficiencies through the building of social capital. TSC’s performance results demonstrate measured system savings, increased patient and provider satisfaction, targeted knowledge growth and confirms that the healthcare system contains a greater than expected abundance of human and financial resources to provide access to appropriate and timely care without any further system investment.

Report cards, performance evaluations, and quality assessments continue to penetrate the lexicon of the healthcare sector. The value of report cards is typically couched as enhancing consumerism among patients, increasing accountability among healthcare providers, and more broadly increasing the transparency of healthcare information. This paper discusses the potential benefits and pitfalls of these performance assessments.

This paper briefly reviews empirical evidence regarding the impact of report cards for healthcare providers and synthesizes the role and limitations of these performance measures into distinct evaluation criteria. The rapid proliferation of report cards for healthcare providers suggests a growing need to develop mechanisms and tools to evaluate their impact. The risks associated with utilizing report cards for provider oversight include the deleterious impact on vulnerable populations and a failure to accurately measure quality of care. The capacity to create report cards should not be the sole criterion to develop and utilize report cards to evaluate healthcare providers. Rather, careful consideration of the benefits and risks should accompany the implementation and utilization of report cards into regulatory processes. This report proposes an evaluation checklist by which to assess the role of report cards in a given healthcare context.

Health disparities exist because discrimination and poverty exist. However, health equity is the right of all. Regardless of differing backgrounds, all human beings should be able to access healthcare services when they experience a change in their physiological, psychological, and spiritual health. Misdiagnoses happen in health care. However, once data yield definitive researched findings of health disparities, the accountability of healthcare professionals begs the question of social justice. The patient is left angry and dismayed. It would seem the best way to move forward would be to forgive so that emotional healing can begin.

According to The Ethics Centre (2018) ‘[T]he social license to operate (SLO) is made up of three components: legitimacy, credibility, and trust’. These three components serve to frame the relationship that has emerged and continues to evolve, its root arguably dating back to the Enlightenment and Post-industrial ages, between the worlds of capitalist commercial and industrial operations, and the liberal-democratic citizenry/consumers of society. The ‘SLO’, it will be shown, has historical grounding that indicate the SLO is a broader translatable concept not limited to the business realm. The SLO, the evidence will show, is a multifaceted concept not least, a unifying vehicle utilized for the purpose of acceptance, to advance normative concerns, and resistance, against questionable and harmful practices. Evidently, many domains of human services operate sub-optimally with less than favourable outcomes. In effect, this translates to structural injustices as characterized by poor understanding, insufficient standards of practice, ineffective safeguard, and governance institutions, perpetuated by entrenched practices, allowing the rise of mediocre service providers no less enabled by deficient regulation. Accordingly, the ethical focus of this paper is on the healthcare system, the evident and unnecessary deficiencies, and the failings of the central governance institutions involved. The underlying characteristics of what constitutes a SLO arguably, whether in name or not, have been engaged to expose, challenge, and repel, unethical conduct that gave rise to multiple health care-related Royal Commissions across Australia; predominantly, impacting the Disability, Aged Care, and Mental Health (DAM) sectors to name a few of recent times.

The Stanford School of Organizational Sociology has influenced the development and direction of healthcare organizations as a field of research in several very significant ways. This chapter will provide a focused review of the major paradigms to develop from work at Stanford from 1970 to 2000, much of which involved the study of processes and structures within and surrounding healthcare organizations during this period. As a subarea of organizational theory and health services research, healthcare organizations embrace both theory-based research and applied research, and they borrow concepts, theories, and methods from medical sociology, organizational theory, healthcare administration and management, and (to a more limited extent) health economics and decision theory. The bulk of this chapter will focus on four major themes or paradigms from research on healthcare organizations that grew from work by faculty and students within the Stanford School of Organizational Sociology: Health Care Outcomes, Internal Organizational Dynamics, Organizations and Their Environments, and Organizational Systems of Care and Populations of Care Providers. Following our examination of these four paradigms, we will consider their implications for current and future debates in health services research and healthcare policy.

Digital healthcare once again emerges due to pandemic (Covid-19). Digital healthcare can be minimising the issue of accessibility, availability, accuracy and affordability of healthcare service during a pandemic. Digital healthcare playsa significant role to provide healthcare equity during the pandemic. This article presents the current trends and scenario of digital healthcare with a focus on health equity. The main objective of this chapter is to review the four aces of health equity in the digital healthcare literature. The scope and challenges faced by the policymakers to implementation of digital healthcare to improve health equity. This chapter considers the hybrid literature review based on the bibliometric and the systematic literature based on the various theme, sub-theme, concept and context-related health equity through digital healthcare. This study provides the previous and current research trends and preposition for the future researcher, healthcare professional, policymakers and digital healthcare innovators to invent the tool which leads the health equity through the digital healthcare in the healthcare.