First-line managers' experience of the use of audit and feedback cycle in specialist mental health care: A qualitative case study

Global supply chain resilience with the flexible partnership

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how multinational corporations respond to environmental turbulence by adopting a flexible supply chain (SC).

Design/methodology/approach

This study adopts a case study in the medical industry to identify effective strategic approaches by taking advantage of new business opportunities and navigating complex business partnerships. This study focuses on medical diagnostic equipment, including computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and X-ray, that involves the suppliers, channel partners and medical users.

Findings

(1) The market turbulence brought the SC leaders to adopt multiple partnership approaches, i.e. funnel-based and area-based partnerships. (2) Adopting a funnel-based partnership allows the SC to seize new market opportunities. Still, it brought a risk element of SC failure from the flawed selection process and professional misconduct. (3) SC leaders adopted flexible partnerships to help address the risk of professional misconduct and select partners for long-term collaboration.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to emergent literature on social exchange theory by exposing the global SC when the SC leaders set up agility approaches. This paper also extends the discussion on the industrial marketing and purchasing theory, which seeks to promote an active buyer–seller relationship.

Systematic Decision-Making for Using Technological Strategies to Implement Evidence-Based Interventions: An Illustrated Case Study

Technology can improve implementation strategies' efficiency, simplifying progress tracking and removing distance-related barriers. However, incorporating technology is meaningful only if the resulting strategy is usable and useful. Hence, we must systematically assess technological strategies' usability and usefulness before employing them. Our objective was therefore to adapt the effort-vs-impact assessment (commonly used in systems science and operations planning) to decision-making for technological implementation strategies. The approach includes three components - assessing the effort needed to make a technological implementation strategy usable, assessing its impact (i.e., usefulness regarding performance/efficiency/quality), and deciding whether/how to use it. The approach generates a two-by-two effort-vs-impact chart that categorizes the strategy by effort (little/much) and impact (small/large), which serves as a guide for deciding whether/how to use the strategy. We provide a case study of applying this approach to design a package of technological strategies for implementing a 5 A's tobacco cessation intervention at a Federally Qualified Health Center. The effort-vs-impact chart guides stakeholder-involved decision-making around considered technologies. Specification of less technological alternatives helps tailor each technological strategy within the package (minimizing the effort needed to make the strategy usable while maximizing its usefulness), aligning to organizational priorities and clinical tasks. Our three-component approach enables methodical and documentable assessments of whether/how to use a technological implementation strategy, building on stakeholder-involved perceptions of its usability and usefulness. As technology advances, results of effort-vs-impact assessments will likely also change. Thus, even for a single technological implementation strategy, the three-component approach can be repeatedly applied to guide implementation in dynamic contexts.