Purpose Lean Management (LM) is a process improvement approach with growing interest from healthcare organizations. Obtaining a culture of continuous improvement is a primary objective of LM, and a culture of continuous improvement indicates a mature LM approach, and here leadership plays a central role. However, a comprehensive overview of leadership activities influencing LM maturity is lacking. This study aims to identify leadership activities associated with continuous improvement and, thus, LM, maturity. Methods Following the PRISMA guidelines, a scoping literature review of peer-reviewed articles was conducted in twenty healthcare management journals. The search provided 466 articles published up until 2023. During the selection process, 23 studies were included in the review. The leadership activities related to continuous improvement maturity were identified using the grounded theory approach and data coding. Results The analysis highlighted a total of 58 leadership activities distributed across nine themes of LM leadership. Next, analysing leadership activities concerning the different maturity levels revealed three maturity stages: beginner, intermediate, and expert. Based on the findings, we propose a framework that guides suitable leadership activities at the various stages of LM maturity. The framework provides leaders in healthcare with a practical overview of actions to facilitate the growth of the LM approach, and the related propositions offer academics a theoretical basis for future studies. Conclusion This review presents the first comprehensive overview of LM leadership activities in relation to continuous improvement and LM maturity. To enhance LM maturity, leaders are encouraged to consider their leadership style, (clinical) stakeholder involvement, alignment with the organizational strategy, and their role in promoting employee autonomy.

Social media have started changing the way that many industries work. However, there is a lack of understanding of these changes, particularly in the context of healthcare, which is known for high information asymmetry between healthcare providers and patients, and authoritative relationships. Yet, the high proliferation of social media in healthcare enables patients to easily communicate with one another, exchanging informational and emotional support. However, it remains unclear how social media is used by patients, how it affects their behavior, their identities and their relationships with healthcare providers. We conduct a literature review and four empirical studies. First, we conduct a systematic literature review on patients’ use of social media and effects of such use. Second, we explore patients’ use of various categories of social media and propose a taxonomy of interactions enabled by social media in healthcare. Third, we explore how the use of social media by two chronic disease patient communities changes their behaviors and identities as well as their relationships with their healthcare providers. Fourth, we explore how healthcare providers’ interactions with patients who use social media change those providers’ occupational identity. Finally, we test to what extent, and through which mechanism, patients’ use of social media changes their relationships with healthcare providers. Taken together, these findings provide a new explanation of the developing role of social media in changing - and strengthening - organization-customer relationships.

Social media enable patients to communicate with a large number of their peers, share experiences, and provide each other with emotional and informational support. In this way, social media using patients develop a new logic in healthcare, which we propose as social media logic. This raises the question what this social media logic means and how it interconnects with traditional clinical logic. To address this question, we draw on interview data with participants from two online health communities to examine how this new social media logic emerges and how it interconnects with clinical logic. We provide preliminary findings through five themes showing that that patients favour experiential knowledge, feel need to connect with others, safely share information, feel empowered and either substitute or complement offline healthcare provision. As a next step, we plan to supplement our data with interviews from doctors and platform managers. We aim to contribute to the healthcare information systems research by addressing recent calls for research on emerging role of social media in healthcare. Garanti; Palgrave Macmillan; Turkish Electro Technology (TET)

Social media enable patients to communicate with a large number of their peers, share experiences, and provide each other with emotional and informational support. Hence, patients can extend their traditional sources of information and build knowledge online with other patients. While limited research presents us with anecdotal evidence or make propositions of the social media effects, current research has not provided a theoretical explanation or empirically tested how social media changes doctor-patient interactions. We draw on self-determination theory to hypothesize the effects of social media use on doctor-patient interactions, namely self-management, empowerment and shared decision making. We propose the explanatory mechanism of self-determination theory through its key concepts of competence, autonomy and relatedness. We employ longitudinal survey in a newly established social media platform for diabetes patients to test our hypotheses.