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The purpose of this paper is to examine the enactment of collaborative governance as a policy strategy in healthcare – in particular its effects in coordinating multiple collaborative initiatives dedicated to improve the performance of health organizations. It studies overarching governance mechanisms that serve as platforms at a meta-level between policy and frontline practice.

Four collaborative governance arrangements dedicated to improve health outcomes in the Netherlands are analyzed in a comparative case-study design, based on extensive document analysis (n=121) and interviews (n=56) with key stakeholders in the field, including the Dutch Ministry of Health, health organizations and other actors.

The studied policy-based governance mechanisms for the coordination of multiple micro-level collaborative initiatives function partly as platforms in bringing actors and resources together successfully. They do so, by fostering evolvability (the capacity to generate diversity in emergent ways) in relation to goal-setting and intermediation between actors. Yet, they marginalize open access to participants through high selectivity and deliberate exclusion strategies for certain actors, contrary to a platform logic of action.

While the collaborative governance literature focuses on these dimensions as independent elements, findings reveal both trade-offs and interdependencies between studied dimensions of coordination associated with platforms, that need to be negotiated and managed.

Selectivity and exclusion in collaborative arrangements may negatively affect relational bonds and ties between actors, which challenges the application of collaborative governance as a policy strategy in pursuit of health objectives.

Responding to recent calls in the literature, this study applies ideas from public administration to the field of health organization and management to avert failures in the translation of policy ambitions into health practice.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate cutting-edge conceptions of the relationship between local processes in the here-and-now, and the broader influences on those processes, that are both organic and overtly designed, and to discern the implications of this relationship for future research, policy and practice.

A focused and structured approach was taken to give effect to this purpose by reviewing the chosen articles in this collection, which from the 2018 Organizational Behavior in Health Care conference papers.

Research in coordination within and across health care boundaries increasingly recognizes: the multilevel influences on human action and interaction in health care delivery; the challenge of balancing individual or local agency with overt interventions; the everchanging the local circumstances of healthcare delivery; and the need to foster reflexivity, that is, self-improvement capacity, in healthcare organizations.

Interventions to improve care coordination must be grounded in the reality of changing local circumstances and incentives for action from the broader environment.

This paper articulates the implied tension in health care delivery between individual and local agency, and imposed structures that may contradict, but are at the same time necessary, to foster such agency.

The use of articles from scientific journals is an important part of research-based teaching at universities. The selection of relevant work from among the increasing amount of scientific literature can be problematic; the challenge is to find relevant recommendations, especially when the related articles are not obviously linked. This paper seeks to discuss these issues.

This paper focuses on the analysis of user activity traces in journals using the open source software “Open Journal Systems” (OJS). The research questions to what extent end users follow a certain link structure given within OJS or immediately select the articles according to their interests. In the latter case, the recorded data sets are used for creating further recommendations. The analysis is based on an article matrix, displaying the usage frequency of articles and their user selected successive articles within the OJS. Furthermore, the navigation paths are analysed.

It was found that the users tend to follow a set navigation structure. Moreover, a hybrid recommendation system for OJS is described, which uses content based filtering as the basic system extended by the results of a collaborative filtering approach.

The paper presents two original contributions: the analysis of user path tracing and a novel algorithm that allows smooth integration of new articles into the existing recommendations, due to the fact that scientific journals are published in a frequent and regular time sequence.