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.

Jiban Khuntia, Mohan Tanniru, Jack Weiner
Health Policy and Technology, Volume 4, Issue 4, Pp. 364-377

Policy mandates and business benefits are propelling hospitals to implement several decision support systems that can help nurses to aid in clinical care decisions. These systems can plausibly reduce errors and provide care by offering real-time alerts about possible adverse reactions. But nurses often suffer “alert fatigue” caused by excessive numbers of warnings within the hospital while providing care. As a result, they may pay less attention to or even ignore some vital alerts, thus limiting these systems׳ effectiveness. In this study, we explore how implementation of an intelligent care system in a hospital with the objective of implementing several decision support systems inadvertently led to a set of alert fatigues. Our analysis of fatigue related technostress suggests a change in management strategy that involves synchronization of people, technology and policies, and is in support of patient care.

Dobin Yim, Jiban Khuntia, Young Argyris
International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics (IJHISI), Volume 10, Issue 3, Pp. 63-84

Online health infomediaries have the objective of knowledge exchange between participants. Visitor contribution is an important factor for the success of the infomediaries. Providers engaged with infomediaries need visitor identification for reputational incentives. However, identification or classification of visitors in online health infomediaries is sparse in literature. This study proposes two dimensions of participation, the intention and intensity levels of visitors, to conceptualize four user categories: community supporters, experiencer providers, knowledge questors, and expertise contributors. The authors validate these categories using a unique large data set collected from a health infomediary for cosmetic surgery, and consisting of 162,598 observed activities of 44,350 visitors, at different participation levels in the year 2012-13. They use cluster analysis to describe similarities and differences among the four user categories. Practice implications are discussed.

Jiban Khuntia, Mohan Tanniru, John Zervos
International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR), Volume 11 Issue 2, Pp. 1-17

In healthcare settings knowledge exchange among important stakeholders such as doctors, family and patients, and other care providers is a critical imperative. However, such a community modelled approach is missing, limited in scope or its business value not well understood. In this study, the authors illustrate the value potential and subsequent development of a business model for knowledge exchange within the healthcare delivery model outside a hospital setting. Specifically, they illustrate how Synchronous Video Consultation with social media features, in a staged approach, can support knowledge exchange among a network of community health care professionals who address global health disparities and sustain this exchange through resource generation. The authors discuss the contributions and implications of the proposed framework towards value creation in a collaborative setting in general and suggest opportunities for future research.

Kaushik Ghosh, Jiban Khuntia, Sudhir Chawla, Xiaodong Deng
Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Volume 34, Article 22

Although information technology (IT) is often argued to have the potential to enable greater patient participation in healthcare delivery, how IT empow ers patients to take charge of their own health is a less explored area. This study explores how IT-enabled communication plays a significant role in shaping the patients’ psychological empow erment for managing a chronic disease—diabetes. Psychological empow erment reflects a patient’s cognitive
response and motivation to manage the disease. Two dimensions of psychological …

Corey Angst, Ritu Agarwal, Guodong Gordon Gao, Jiban Khuntia, Jeffrey S McCullough
Decision Support Systems, Volume 57, Issue 1, Pp. 367-375

Information asymmetry between consumers and health care providers is a well-known phenomenon in health care systems. Disclosure of health care quality information is one important mechanism through which hospitals can signal performance to potential patients and competitors, yet little is known about the organizational factors that contribute to voluntary disclosure. In this study we develop an empirical model to investigate the factors associated with choosing to participate in a voluntary quality disclosure initiative, specifically isolating the importance of information technology (IT) in facilitating disclosure. We extend the scope of prior work on the quality disclosure choice by augmenting it with an important decision variable: the operational costs of collecting and reporting quality data. We suggest that IT can facilitate disclosure by reducing these costs, thereby extending the literature on the value of IT. Empirical findings using data from a major voluntary quality disclosure program in California hospitals support our assertion related to the role of IT. Our results further highlight other hospital characteristics contributing to disclosure. We discuss implications of these findings for research and practice.