Jack Weiner, Mohan Tanniru, Jiban Khuntia, David Bobryk, Mehul Naik, Kenneth LePage
Journal of Hospital Administration, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pp. 34-43.

Background: Regulatory and competitive pressures and the need for cross-organizational data sharing are demanding that hospital leaders create a data-driven decision making culture to improve performance. Using an innovation assimilation strategy framework, this paper describes how a hospital used its implementation of a Real Time Dashboard System (rtDashboard) to improve performance, change its organizational culture and put it on a path towards digital leadership (DL).
Objective: Implement an rtDashboard system that can support a data-driven decision making culture for performance improvement while engaging business and information technology (IT) leaders in DL practice.
Results: The rtDashboard contributed significantly to monitoring hospital performance and influenced change in unit level decision making that was aligned with hospital goals. The rtDashboard implementation not only provided substantial performance improvement and quality benchmarking, but also changed the responsibility and accountability culture and helped the hospital put in practice DL principles to support future innovations.
Conclusions: DL through rtDashboard is a demonstration of how a hospital can seek and strive for excellence. As much as dashboards are pivotal to organizational performance monitoring at the senior leadership level, the process used to diffuse it to every operational unit in support of a data-driven decision making culture showcases how hospital executives and IT leaders can work together to continually align and re-align their strategies to reach organizational goals – the core of DL practice.

Jiban Khuntia, Mohan Tanniru, Fabian Fregoli, Matthew Nawrocki
Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Volume 8, Issue 1, Pp. 333-64

The nurse call system is the lifeline for a patient in a hospital room. Nurse call systems help patients initiate calls from their room in a hospital, and the response to these calls is a crucial factor in providing timely quality care and improving patient satisfaction. Two questions arise in relation to response time. Are there differences in the response to patient calls in different hospital units? Does an IT-enabled escalation of calls to ensure care quality improve the call response efficiency and effectiveness? In this study, we explore these two research questions. We argue that differences in call response time are influenced by two operational attributes of care units: velocity and uncertainty. These attributes will determine how nursing staff view both the need and urgency associated with calls and respond to them. Internet discussion forums at allnurses.com (secondary data analysis) are used to answer the first question. The analysis validates a 2 × 2 framework, which maps four different hospital units on velocity and uncertainty dimensions. A quantitative approach is then used to address the second question by analyzing the response time differences to patient calls by different hospital units when an IT-based escalation protocol is used. Data from 1,131 patient rooms provides evidence of response time differences in different units, each with a varying degree of velocity and uncertainty. We then discuss the implications of this research for future studies on patient satisfaction using a single metric such as nurse call response time.