Joonhwan In

Unlike industrial sectors, quality of care is of critical importance in the healthcare sector. Accordingly, incorporating environmental sustainability into healthcare services poses a unique challenge since hospitals must strike a balance among service quality (i.e., clinical quality and patient experience), cost efficiency, and environmental footprints. However, much prior research has focused primarily on the financial benefits of environmental sustainability, mainly in industrial sectors. Environmental sustainability in relation to service quality remains an underexplored topic in literature. As such, it is still unclear whether a hospital's efforts toward environmental sustainability will pay off since the environmental sustainability mantra of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” may not be suitable for healthcare settings. Drawing upon the premise of a practice‐based view, we investigate environmental sustainability in relation to service quality and financial performance in the U.S. healthcare setting. Specifically, this study examines how a hospital's environmental practices impact its service quality and financial performance. Additionally, we examine whether a hospital's continued efforts toward environmental sustainability can generate enduring performance benefits. Overall, our analysis demonstrates the service quality and financial benefits of environmental sustainability in healthcare. However, persistent efforts only lead to enduring financial benefits, not service‐quality benefits.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the performance implications of an information governance (IG) framework for managing, controlling access to and securing information, focusing on (1) the performance benefits of an organization's IG orientation and (2) how the configuration of IG orientation and supply chain (SC) strategy type relate to performance outcomes.Design/methodology/approach: This study leverages multiple secondary sources for US hospitals, serving as the context for the study. It also employs cluster analysis to develop an SC strategy taxonomy, namely sophisticated and delivery-focused SC strategies. The proposed research model is tested using a robust regression to mitigate the influence of outliers and produce more accurate estimates.Findings: IG orientation is positively associated with financial performance and patient experience, and IG-oriented hospitals with a sophisticated SC strategy realize more financial benefits and achieve better patient care experiences compared to other configurations. Regardless of SC strategy type, IG-oriented hospitals offer better care experiences than non-IG-oriented hospitals.Practical implications: This paper offers empirical evidence that a hospital's IG orientation and SC strategy jointly affect financial outcomes and patient experience. For hospitals, an organization-wide framework for governing information streamlines both intra- and inter-organizational information flows and improves care delivery throughout a patient's care experience.Originality/value: This is one of a few studies that empirically examine the performance implications of governance of information in the domain of supply chain management (SCM). This study also develops an SC strategy taxonomy for the healthcare context and offers a springboard for research in service SC strategy.

Purpose: As social media platforms become increasingly popular among service firms, many US hospitals have been using social media as a means to improve their patients’ experiences. However, little research has explored the implications of social media use within a hospital context. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a hospital’s customer engagement through social media and its association with customers’ experiential quality. Also, this study examines the role of a hospital’s service characteristics, which could shape the nature of the interactions between patients and the hospital.Design/methodology/approach: Data from 669 hospitals with complete experiential quality and demographic data were collected from multiple sources of secondary data, including the rankings of social media friendly hospitals, the Hospital Compare database, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) cost report, the CMS impact file, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Analytics database and the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Specifically, the authors designed the instrumental variable estimate to address the endogeneity issue.Findings: The empirical results suggest a positive association between a hospital’s social media engagement and experiential quality. For hospitals with a high level of service sophistication, the association between online engagement and experiential quality becomes more salient. For hospitals offering various services, offline engagement is a critical predictor of experiential quality.Research limitations/implications: A hospital with more complex services should make efforts to engage customers through social media for better patient experiences. The sample is selected from databases in the US, and the databases are cross-sectional in nature.Practical implications: Not all hospitals may be better off improving the patient experience by engaging customers through social media. Therefore, practitioners should exercise caution in applying the study’s results to other contexts and in making causal inferences.Originality/value: The current study delineates customer engagement through social media into online and offline customer engagement. This study is based on the theory of customer engagement and reflects the development of mobile technology. Moreover, this research may be considered as pioneering in that it considers the key characteristics of a hospital’s service operations (i.e., service complexity) when discovering the link between customers’ engagement through a hospital’s social media and experiential quality.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a scalable conceptual framework for governance of supply chain (SC) information flows by re-contextualizing the organizational concept of information governance as an SC concept. Design/methodology/approach: This study leverages the strategy-structure-process-performance (SSPP) theory base to explain how effective SC information governance relates to improved internal SC performance. Via an in-depth literature review followed by conceptual theory building, the key features of organizational-level information governance are cast into a theoretical framework. Findings: This study presents the theoretical framework that explains how SC information governance should contribute to improved internal SC performance. The proposed framework provides a theoretical basis for future research on SC information governance and would become a useful first step to extend the concept of SC information governance at the SC level. Practical implications: SC managers should be aware that information governance mechanisms, rather than the management of basic, information flow-directed processes, to yield the best performance outcomes. Because of the numerous touch points information has in complex SCs, managing the quality of SC information through broader, higher-level governance standards is more important than maximizing connectivity and information flows, and information governance structures/policies across organizations should be designed accordingly. Originality/value: This study theoretically links SC information governance and internal SC performance via information quality. It also advances the understanding of SC information flow by challenging the implicit but flawed assumption that uniformity of information quality within the supply chain to create the best outcomes.

Hospitals in the United States (U.S.), and the healthcare industry as a whole, are experiencing major transformations that will likely affect every facet of our society. One such example is a federal regulation known as the Value‐based Purchasing (VBP) program, which shifts hospital reimbursements for services rendered away from a fee‐for‐service model to a value‐based model. This change requires hospitals to more accurately track and document resources/assets utilized in the delivery of care, in addition to appropriate health outcomes. Hence, the focus of this study is on assessing the effect of the joint use of RFID and EDI on hospital performance, namely supply chain cost efficiency, personnel expenses, and hospital readmission rates. The findings, based on secondary, longitudinal data on more than 3300 US hospitals spanning eight years, suggest that hospitals bundling RFID and EDI experience an initial decrease in supply chain cost efficiency and increase in personnel expenses, with no immediate impact on readmission rates. However, over time, better supply chain cost efficiency, lower personnel expenses, and a consistent reduction in readmission rates accrue from the long‐term and consistent leveraging of the RFID‐EDI bundle. Thus, the overarching contribution of this study is the elucidation of how and along what measures the bundled leveraging of RFID and EDI improves hospital performance, as well as which measures of hospital performance are time (in)variant. We round out this study with a discussion of our findings, their implications, and offer directions for future research.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a systematic application of middle-range theorizing, which pays particular attention to contexts and mechanisms, can be used to extend current knowledge on logistics customer service (LCS) in a number of critical areas.Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies Stanket al.’s (2017) framework for middle-ranging theorizing in logistics to develop a research framework and agenda that can guide future LCS research. Results are generated through a review of the LCS literature and an application of the main concepts of middle-range theorizing.Findings: The paper outlines opportunities for middle-range research that would extend LCS knowledge in the areas of human and behavioral factors, time-based competition, supply chain complexity, and digitization and technological innovation.Research limitations/implications: Describing the main characteristics of middle-range theorizing and how middle-range theorizing can be fruitfully applied to LCS research should help to stimulate new knowledge creation in this important area of supply chain logistics management.Practical implications: By focusing on why and when questions, middle-range theorizing engages with the practical realities of LCS that interest managers and students. Middle-range theorizing moves researchers toward developing a detailed understanding of what actually has to change in order for desired LCS-related outcomes to occur and the contextual factors likely impacting the change process. The paper should, therefore, allow managers to better translate LCS theory into action.Originality/value: Middle-range theorizing remains new to the supply chain logistics field. The application of middle-range theorizing to LCS research, and logistics research more generally, demands new perspectives on established relationships with the potential to drive original research in areas most relevant to managers.

Logistics has evolved from a description‐based discipline to one based upon theoretical grounding from other business disciplines to define, explain, and understand complex interrelationships, resulting in the identification of the discipline's primary domain and major concepts—the “what's” of logistics. General theories, however, lack the domain specificity critical to understanding the inner workings within key relationships—the how's, why's, and when's—that drive actual outcomes. Middle‐range theorizing (MRT) enables researchers to focus on these inner workings to develop a deeper understanding of the degree to and conditions under which logistics phenomena impact outcomes as well as the mechanisms through which such outcomes are manifested. This study seeks to spur logistics research at the middle‐range level by presenting a context and mechanism‐based approach to MRT, outlining a process with guidelines for how to theorize at the middle range, and providing a template and examples of deductive and inductive MRT.