D igital assets are growing in scale, scope, and importance, amplifying the necessity to maintain their confidentiality.Yet, digital confidentiality has received vastly less research attention from operations and supply chain management (OSCM) scholars than cost, quality, flexibility, delivery, and innovation. We contend that this lack of attention has, at least partly, produced recommendations that ultimately could harm digital confidentiality performance. To guide future research, we synthesize relevant gaps across the OSCM and information systems literatures and discuss relevant OSCM research opportunities. Many of these opportunities are articulated as propositions. We also discuss contemporary industry practices aimed at upholding digital confidentiality. We call for the OSCM community to consistently and explicitly examine digital confidentiality as a performance dimension, and argue that failure to heed this call will be detrimental to our field's influence and relevance as digital assets continue to increase in value relative to physical ones.

Product development networks facilitate access to information, knowledge, and technologies that are otherwise difficult to obtain during innovation activities. Most current research on networks focuses on studying product performance benefits, but ignores the potential negative effects on confidentiality performance. Addressing this gap, we investigate how two key components of a firm's network position-network centrality and structural holes-affect both product and confidentiality performance. To do this, we assemble a panel of 1,468 electronic video games designed and developed by 591 developers over an 11-year period. We find that higher network centrality relates to better product performance but worse confidentiality performance. Meanwhile, firms spanning more structural holes enjoy better performance across both dimensions. In an exploratory analysis, we find that product novelty strengthens the positive relationship between network centrality and product performance but mutes the positive relationship between structural holes and product performance. We discuss the importance of these findings to the literature on innovation in inter-organizational networks.

Problem definition: This study explores the performance implications of collaboration structures in an integrated healthcare delivery system, namely, an accountable care organization (ACO). ACOs consist of providers from various stages of the care continuum (preacute, acute, and postacute) that voluntarily assume collective responsibility for the quality and cost of care for a defined patient population. Academic/practical relevance: ACOs’ unsatisfied outcomes are largely due to a lack of provider collaboration. There is a dearth of empirical studies on how to develop collaboration structures. Studies in the healthcare operations management primarily have focused on collaboration within a single organization, shedding little light on this problem. We address this issue by exploring two distinct dimensions of collaboration: partnership scope and scale. Partnership scope measures the presence of providers from the preacute, acute, and/or postacute care-continuum stages, whereas partnership scale measures the presence of providers within a single care-continuum stage. Methodology: We assemble a unique data set of provider types, collaboration structures, and system-level performance for 528 Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) ACOs from 2013–2016. To investigate the impact of partnership scope and scale on ACO performance, we then use econometric estimation approaches that account for endogeneity in collaboration structure decisions. ACO performance is measured by experiential quality and 30-day readmission rates. As additional tests, we also investigate our research questions by assembling data sets at both the hospital level (20,975 hospital-year panel data spanning 2009 to 2015) and patient level (859,145 Medicare patients admitted to 39 California hospitals over a four-year period from 2012 to 2015). Results: We find that synergies exist between partnership scope and scale with respect to ACO performance. Specifically, an average-sized ACO can realize 3.2% more improvement in experiential quality and a 6.6% greater reduction in 30-day readmission rates through partnership scope and scale synergies in the preacute care stage. We also show that the benefits of increasing partnership scope are consistent across providers and patient-level analysis. Further, we find that these benefits come at some cost, suggesting an initial cost-quality trade-off when developing collaboration structures. Managerial implications: Our results offer important insights into the healthcare operations management literature on designing effective healthcare delivery systems extending beyond a single organization.

T his study investigates diagnostic testing and pharmacy expenditures, commonly referred to as ancillary costs in the United States acute-care hospitals. These ancillary costs are charges associated with services provided to support patient treatment, including laboratory, radiology, and pharmacy charges. Despite of investment in inter-organizational and technological collaboration practices, these costs continue to rise. Our research examines the role of individual healthcare providers, namely multisiting physicians, who practice at more than one hospital, in reducing ancillary cost. We also look at how inter-organizational collaboration measured by the hospital's affiliation in an accountable care organization (ACO) model affect this relationship. To do this, we assembled a unique data set of 163,617 patients treated by 4411 physicians at 182 hospitals in Florida from 2014 to 2016. Using an econometric estimation approach accounting for endogeneity, we find that patients treated by multisiting physicians experienced, on an average, per-hospitalization reduction in laboratory and radiology charges of 58.57% and 30.11%, respectively. These savings increase when multisiting physicians have less practice experience. We also find that hospitals participating in ACO model complement the savings achieved through multisiting physicians in the form of even lower pharmacy costs. In post-hoc analyses, we find such cost reduction comes from reducing the total number of procedures or tests ordered. We also show that the lower treatment charges do not compromise the clinical quality of patients treated by multisiting physicians. Collectively, the findings offer important insights to the healthcare operations management literature on the interaction between individual-organizational collaboration efforts and patient-level outcomes.