A Decision-Making Tool for a Regional Network of Clinical Laboratories

For healthcare systems that operate in large, geographically dispersed areas, the quality of the services provided requires the effective management of a complex transportation problem. We present a decision support system to help healthcare managers improve the delivery of biological samples collected from patients in hospitals and outpatient clinics to laboratories that perform tests on them. We develop an optimization model for supporting strategic decisions on the transport of samples and the assignment of work in a large healthcare network with geographically dispersed hospitals, clinics, and testing laboratories. We embed our model in a Web-based tool to provide planners with interactive functions, enabling them to explore solutions and interactively access data to facilitate the analysis of what-if scenarios. The tool proved invaluable in helping the Andalusian Healthcare System obtain significant improvements in efficiency, quality of service, and outsourcing costsJunta de Andalucía TEP-606

Electronic Medical Record Adoption in New Zealand Primary Care Physician Offices

Describes EMR adoption in New Zealand's primary healthcare system, including how government investment was secured and data protection laws, unique patient identifiers, and standards and certification were established, with lessons for the United States

The Governance of Knowledge in Academic Spin-Offs. The Case of Emilia-Romagna.

The phenomenon of academic spin-offs (ASOs) has been widely studied in recent times. Scholars have mainly concentrated on identifying the factors that favours the phenomenon and the incentive alignments of the parties involved in the process. These works tend to remain static in nature by solely investigating the ex ante determinants of the process, that is the elements that favoured a context to be more profitable than others, usually in terms of the number of ASOs generated. More recently scholars have also acknowledged that ASOs are heterogeneous firms and have started investigating the development process of such firms. It has been highlighted that ASOs need to overcome certain defined stage of growth in order to become established firms in the market. Our work continues this line of investigation and aims to gives evidence that the paths of ASO development are heterogeneous themselves. We investigate the flows of knowledge taking place within and across the firm in a dynamic manner, at various stage of the development process of the firm: we study the governance of knowledge in a sub-population of ASOs and give evidence of the variety of possible ways the firm can develop.governance of knowledge; academic spin-off; theory of the firm; technology development

Control and change studying the process of institutionalisation

This paper studies the process by which a change in the institutional logic of an organisational field diffuses through the management control system of a firm.change; institutionalisation; management control systems; decoupling; salespeople

Control and Change. Analysing the Process of Institutionalisation

This paper studies the process by which a change in the institutional logic of an organisational field is institutionalised in management control systems of a firm. In particular, three elements of organisational control, inspired by the control mix defined by Abernethy and Chua (1996), are studied: management culture, division of powers between functions, and accountability principles. The theoretical framework proposed by Hasselbladh and Kallinikos (2000) enables us to describe the institutionalisation process of management control systems in more detail by observing how ideals are translated into discourse and in turn control techniques. The paper also investigates the internalisation and “decoupling” occurring between the implementation of control systems, and their actual use when applied for monitoring operational managers. Indeed, the empirical findings, based on a field study conducted in the French subsidiary of a pharmaceutical laboratory, enable us to identify a persistent decoupling. Our results show it stems from ambiguous managerial choices and the resistance of the actors to the new norm. However, it appears that, when discourse can not be heard, it can be partially bypassed using techniques. In fact, these techniques enable an insidious institutionalisation of the new institutional logics when “what can be done can not be saidcontrol, change, process of institutionalisation

Biological Terrorism, Emerging Diseases, and National Security

Examines the extent to which bioterrorist attacks have proven or may prove difficult to distinguish from outbreaks of emerging diseases. Makes recommendations for how the U.S. could better prepare to meet the threat of biological terrorism

Building the Science Foundation of a Modern Food Safety System: Lessons From Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom on Creating a More Coordinated and Integrated Approach to Food Safety Information

Examines how food safety reforms in three countries and the European Union affected data collection and analysis, coordination and integrated approaches, and use of data for prevention. Makes recommendations for U.S. programs, policies, and activities

Making use of icould: learning from practice

icould, is an online careers resource which provides individual’s with access to the work and life experiences of hundreds of people in the form of online careers films. The films are supplemented with labour market information and other resources. This approach seeks to provide both a self-directed resource for career explorers and a resource that can be used by career and education professionals to enhance their practice. In addition, icould provides a range of information, games, interactive activities and other resources that can also be used either directly by a career explorer or as underpinning resources for professionals working in the field. icould is a technically innovative product which utilises multi-media content, interactivity and social media in new ways to provide career support. icould has become popular with career professionals and other educators and is frequently used as part of the delivery of career support. icould has produced a very useful suite of resources for teachers to facilitate its use in practice. However, up until now there has been no investigation of the ways that icould is actually being used in practice. Consequently in this project we sought to draw this practice together and to present it in a way that might stimulate, inform and inspire future practice. To do this a diverse group of practitioners were recruited to form a community of practice (COP). This report provides new ideas and insights into the way which the icould website is used by practitioners

Centerscope

Centerscope, formerly Scope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center "to communicate the concern of the Medical Center for the development and maintenance of improved health care in contemporary society.