COINs17
7th International Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks
RESILIENCE THROUGH COINs
September 14th -17th 2017, Detroit, Michigan, USAHealthcare Track: Improving Resilience of Healthcare Systems
This track aims at collecting relevant and robust contributions that advance both theory and practice in building
Resilient Healthcare Systems through Collaborative Innovation Networks.
The topic is at the same time scholarly interesting and practically relevant.
The Healthcare Systems of the most developed countries are stressed by external and internal forces and unlikely will
be sustainable in the next future: policy-makers, hospital managers and professionals are searching for improvement
strategies to guarantee the delivery of high-quality, low-cost and safe care.
Generally, the term resilience describes the ability to cope with internal and external shocks. Resilient Organizations
manage to adapt for a change of environment. This concept applies also to Healthcare organizations which - beyond
the current crisis - constantly face stress, shocks, crises and change of environment: e.g. demographic change, rising
health care costs, the obesity epidemic and pandemic outbreaks (Maresso et al., 2013).
Building resilience is a context-dependent and iterative process. Authors in diverse fields such as ecology, engineering,
complex adaptive systems, psychology, and public health have produced resilience frameworks trying to advanceassessments of system capacities and weaknesses, investments in vulnerable components of the system before acrisis, reinforcements during the emergency, and review of performance after a crisis.
Resilient Healthcare Systems are ideally: aware (i.e. confident of the areas of strength and vulnerability), diverse (i.e.
able to address a broad range of health challenges), self-regulated (i.e. capable to isolate health threats and avoid
propagating instability throughout the system), integrated (i.e. able to bring together different actors, ideas, andgroups to formulate solutions, adaptive (i.e flexible and reactive to enhance performance in the short term and,ideally, contribute to build long-term resilience). In short, they show all properties of Collaborative Innovation
Networks (COINs).
Information sharing, communication, and coordination of multiple actors through internal and external process
networks – innovatively supported by new technologies - are focal factors enabling smart monitoring, control,integration and flexibility of the Healthcare networks, and thus potentially effective drivers of change for the system.
This track invites original contributions to stimulate the debate about the role of resilience in healthcare system, withrespect – but not limited – to the following perspectives:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
(vi)
(vii)

What does Resilience in healthcare systems actually mean? How can we measure it? Which are possible
enablers, drivers and factors boosting resilience in these kinds of systems?
How might COINs assist in building resilient healthcare systems or improve resilience in existing ones?
How might research on Big Data help decision-making and management in healthcare?
How do healthcare decision-makers contribute at different levels to build resilience of healthcareorganizations?
How can performance be measured in healthcare to facilitate the convergence toward resilience?
Which role does qualitative/quantitative research play within such a framework?
Do experiments, simulations, process-mining techniques generate evidence that matters in building
Healthcare resilience?

We invite contributions dealing with either methodological/theoretical issues or empirical investigations. The track isopen to a broad audience aiming to stimulate cross-sector debates among academics and practitioners.
Authors of high quality papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the special issue on “Evidence-BasedManagementforPerformance
Improvement
inHealthCare”
inManagement
Decisionjournal(http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=md). Papers will undergo to a double blind
peer review process.
See the general COINs’ Call for Paper for more details about submission deadlines and formats of papers.
Track Chairs
Davide Aloini, University of Pisa – DESTEC, Italy
Michael Seid, James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, CCHMC, OhioPeter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, USA