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Deployment of health information technologies (HITs) provides home care units with the means to generate improvements in accuracy and timeliness of information required to meet dynamic patient demands and provide high quality patient care. Increasing availability of information can also facilitate organisational learning, which leads to the invocation of processes that result in improved responses and decisions. This study examined crucial links between HITs and quality of service provided through an empirical investigation of 252 patients in a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) in a Spanish regional hospital. The study sought to test the relationship between HITs and the quality of service using factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate how HITs mediate effects of organisational learning on quality of service. Findings support the notion that the relationship between organisational learning and quality of service can be mediated by HITs. This study provides HHU managers with guidelines for understanding the role of organisational learning processes with respect toHITs and quality of service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is clear from the literature that in situations where organizations and their members face changing environments, it is necessary that mechanisms (learning) exist to capture the new knowledge which enables the firms to address those changes. This article examines the relative importance and significance of the existence of an 'open-mindedness context' to the existence and nature of 'organizational learning'. We include time as a variable in the analysis and focus on the need to unlearn at a moment (T) in order to learn more efficiently at a moment after (T+1). These relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of 107 Spanish small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within the telecommunications industry. The results indicate that the effects of exploration and exploitation of knowledge at moment T+1 is conditioned by the existence of an 'open-mindedness culture' at moment T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]