COMPETITIVE STRATEGY, ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING AND PERFORMANCE: A CONTEXT SPECIFIC ANALYSIS OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP

Exploring Current Practices, Needs, and Barriers for Expanding Distributed Medical Education and Scholarship in Psychiatry: Protocol for an Environmental Scan Using a Formal Information Search Approach and Explanatory Design

BACKGROUND

Distributed medical education (DME) offers manifold benefits, such as increased training capacity, enhanced clinical learning, and enhanced rural physician recruitment. Engaged faculty are pivotal to DME's success, necessitating efforts from the academic department to promote integration into scholarly and research activities. Environmental scanning has been used to gather, analyze, and apply information for strategic planning purposes. It helps organizations identify current practices, assess needs and barriers, and respond to emerging risks and opportunities. There are process models and conceptual frameworks developed for environmental scanning in the business and educational sectors. However, the literature lacks methodological direction on how to go about designing and implementing this strategy to guide research and practice in DME, especially in the psychiatry field.

OBJECTIVE

This paper presents a protocol for an environmental scanning that aims to understand current practices and identify needs and barriers that must be addressed to facilitate the integration of psychiatrists from the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine's distributed education sites in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the Department of Psychiatry, contributing for the expansion of DME in both provinces and informing strategic planning and decision-making within the organization.

METHODS

This protocol adopts an innovative approach combining a formal information search and an explanatory design that includes quantitative and qualitative data. About 120 psychiatrists from 8 administrative health zones of both provinces will be invited to complete an anonymous web-based survey with questions about demographics, participants' experience and interest in undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing medical education, research and scholarly activities, quality improvement, and knowledge translation. Focus group sessions will be conducted with a purposive sample of psychiatrists to collect qualitative data on their perspectives on the expansion of DME.

RESULTS

Results are expected within 6 months of data collection and will inform policy options for expanding Dalhousie University's psychiatry residency and fellowship programs using the infrastructure and human resources at distributed learning sites, leveraging opportunities regionally, especially in rural areas.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper proposes a comprehensive environmental scan procedure adapted from existing approaches. It does this by collecting important characteristics that affect psychiatrists' desire to be involved with research and scholarly activities, which is crucial for the DME expansion. Furthermore, its concordance with the literature facilitates interpretation and comparison. The protocol's new method also fills DME information gaps, allowing one to identify insights and patterns that may shape psychiatric education. This environmental scan's results will answer essential questions about how training programs could involve therapists outside the academic core and make the most of training experiences in semiurban and rural areas. This could help other psychiatry and medical units outside tertiary care establish residency and fellowship programs.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

DERR1-10.2196/46835.

The Moderating Effect of the Social Deprivation Index (SDI) on the Relationship Between Hospital Strategy and Financial Performance

Background: One of the major tenets of contingency theory is that the appropriate fit between strategy and environmental contingencies results in better financial performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the Social Deprivation Index (SDI) moderates the association between hospital strategy and financial performance. Methods: We used longitudinal data from 2011 to 2016 from US urban general acute care hospitals. Four secondary datasets were used: the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey, Medicare cost reports (CMS), Area Health Resource File (AHRF), and the Robert Graham Center's SDI. A generalized estimating equation (GEE) regression model was used to analyze the data. An interaction term was used to test the moderating effect of the SDI on the strategy-financial performance relationship. Results and Discussion: Our results showed that compared to hybrids, the SDI moderates the relationship between strategy and financial performance for cost leaders and hybrids. Increasing market social deprivation increases the hospital operating margin of cost leaders by 0.06%. Similarly, increasing levels of market social deprivation increases the hospital operating margin of hybrids by 0.06% (p < 0.05). As such, our results suggest that social deprivation may affect the viability of hospital strategy.

The use of the environmental scan in health services delivery research: a scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION

The environmental scan has been described as an important tool to inform decision-making on policy, planning and programme development in the healthcare sector. Despite the wide adoption of environmental scans, there is no consensus on a working definition within the health services delivery context and methodological guidance on the design and implementation of this approach is lacking in the literature. The objectives of this study are to map the extent, range and nature of evidence that describe the definitions, characteristics, conceptualisations, theoretical underpinnings, study limitations and other features of the environmental scan in the health services delivery literature and to propose a working definition specific to this context.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

This protocol describes a scoping review based on the methodology outlined by Khalil and colleagues. A comprehensive search strategy was developed by experienced health science librarians in consultation with the research team. A Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) was completed. Two reviewers will independently screen titles, abstracts and full-text articles and select studies meeting the inclusion criteria from seven electronic databases: Academic Search Premier, Canadian Business & Current Affairs (CBCA), CINAHL, ERIC, Embase, MEDLINE and PsycINFO. The grey literature and reference lists of included articles will also be searched. The data will be analysed and presented in tabular format, and will include a descriptive numerical summary as well as a qualitative thematic analysis.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

This protocol provides an audit trail for a scoping review that will advance understanding about the environmental scan and its application in the health services delivery context. The review will propose a working definition and will inform future research to explore the development of a conceptual framework in this context. Findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations. The scoping review does not require ethics approval.

The launch strategy choices in China’s pharmaceutical market

Purpose

This paper aims to study the drug launch strategies and their effects on new drug performance in an intensely competitive emerging pharmaceutical market such as the one in China.

Design/methodology/approach

Data on market share, sales, related firm size and annual profit were obtained for the period, 2004-2008. Profile deviation and cluster analysis approaches were applied in this study.

Findings

There is a significant effect of an optimal launch strategy on new drug performance given the respective resource availability and the market environment situations.

Practical implications

The study suggests that multi-national corporations may prove resilient in the emerging economies through both innovative and cost-driven offerings in different therapeutic categories.

Originality/value

This research is unique in studying the drug launch strategies across both foreign firms and local firms in a competitive emerging pharmaceutical market.

Environmental scanning in business organisations

Purpose

– This study aims to analyse the environmental scanning and information sources used by Jordanian firms. Furthermore, the relationship between environmental scanning and organisational characteristics (firm size and industry type), as well as organisational performance, is explored.

Design/methodology/approach

– The empirical research was coordinated via a survey of 190 Jordanian publicly quoted firms. The results of the survey provided a rich source of data in relation to a variety of practices associated with environmental scanning in these firms.

Findings

– The findings of this study show that scanning focus was higher for the general environmental sectors than the task environmental sectors. The results also demonstrate that these firms rely more on internal sources of information. Larger firms have more scanning activities, while smaller firms tend to focus on different sources of information. Additionally, some differences in the industry sector in terms of scanning behaviour were identified. This study also supports the literature regarding the positive relationship between environment scanning and organisational performance by providing new empirical evidence from the context of Middle East countries.

Originality/value

– This paper provides empirical evidence on the nature and the practice of environmental scanning and its value for organisational performance in business firms in a Middle East context. From a theoretical perspective, this study engages in the “convergence versus divergence” debate regarding managers’ scanning behaviour around the world.

Environmental scanning as a moderator of strategy–performance relationships: an empirical analysis of physical therapy facilities

To date, strategic management research in health care is largely confined to the acute care sector of the industry. This research examines the linkages among environmental scanning, competitive strategy and performance in physical therapy facilities. Nontrivial differences between acute and subacute care firms suggest the role of environmental scanning may change in non-acute care settings. Consistent with previous research, these results indicate that the frequency of internal and external scanning is related to the strategic orientation of physical therapy facilities. Contrary to the expectations, broader scope of scanning is positively related to an increasing market-focused and increasing efficiency strategic orientation. A key objective of the research is to test the impact of strategy/scanning alignment on facility performance. These findings support predictions on the moderating role of scanning activities in the strategy–performance relationship. However, a para-doxical pattern of results has possible implications for clinician managers in subacute care settings as well as the interpretation of scanning activities.