Method Usefulness for Quality Improvement in Care

Complexity in care arises from several concurrent sources, such as siloed care organisations and complex care processes handled by several medical specialities. Due to factors including the ongoing development of personalised care and increasingly older populations suffering from multi-sickness, care complexity can only be expected to increase. Simultaneously, organisational efficiency needs to be increased alongside this growing complexity. To address these challenges, there is a need to understand care complexity in order to drive care improvement.Quality improvement (QI) aims to develop health and social care. Methods are central for QI by describing the care and thereby support i) planning for future care, ii) acquisition of knowledge and understanding of the current practice, and iii) prediction of the future of care from historical data. Methods for QI generally display data in a simple, graphic way, so that they are easy for practitioners to understand; however, this strong focus on simplicity may limit the understanding of care complexity and thereby reduce the support provided for QI. As QI research with a focus on methods describing care complexity is scarce, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the usefulness of methods describing care complexity for QI in care.To fulfil this purpose, two research questions guided the analysis of the five appended papers. The first research question (What usefulness can visual methods describing care process complexity have for QI?) addresses the need to identify new methods describing care complexity where current methods are lacking. Two methods are chosen, guided by visual analytics theory: Lexis diagram and process mining. Two case studies and a literature review explore the usefulness of Lexis diagrams and process mining through visualisation of process variations at a patient and a population level, across groups and over time. The second research question (What usefulness can methods describing care organisation complexity have for QI in public procurement?) expands and explores the use of current methods describing complexity into the public care procurement context. First, the current state of QI in public care procurement is explored through an archival study, and next, a case study is conducted to explore the use of business excellence models to support QI in public care procurement. The thesis is guided by a pragmatic approach, leading to a mixed-methods approach and domain expert collaboration.This thesis makes three main contributions. First, each method’s properties are connected to a set of evaluative and organisational benefits, revealing the possibility of and need for matching methods to the local contextual conditions and needs for QI. Subsequently, a framework for this task is presented. Second, the results on the explored methods describing care complexity yield additional understanding of variations and care systems across stakeholders compared to traditional methods used for QI in each context. Methods describing care complexity may, therefore, be useful to support QI efforts. Third, when methods describe care complexity, stakeholders might be supported in driving local QI efforts, and as the new perspectives seem to challenge their mental models, they also seem to develop their understanding of QI.The findings and conclusions of this thesis primarily contribute to the QI research field but can also inform other research on Lexis diagrams, process mining, and public care procurement

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

Estimating, planning and managing Agile Web development projects under a value-based perspective

Context: The processes of estimating, planning and managing are crucial for software development projects, since the results must be related to several business strategies. The broad expansion of the Internet and the global and interconnected economy make Web development projects be often characterized by expressions like delivering as soon as possible, reducing time to market and adapting to undefined requirements. In this kind of environment, traditional methodologies based on predictive techniques sometimes do not offer very satisfactory results. The rise of Agile methodologies and practices has provided some useful tools that, combined with Web Engineering techniques, can help to establish a framework to estimate, manage and plan Web development projects. Objective: This paper presents a proposal for estimating, planning and managing Web projects, by combining some existing Agile techniques with Web Engineering principles, presenting them as an unified framework which uses the business value to guide the delivery of features. Method: The proposal is analyzed by means of a case study, including a real-life project, in order to obtain relevant conclusions. Results: The results achieved after using the framework in a development project are presented, including interesting results on project planning and estimation, as well as on team productivity throughout the project. Conclusion: It is concluded that the framework can be useful in order to better manage Web-based projects, through a continuous value-based estimation and management process.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

An Architecture for Information Commerce Systems

The increasing use of the Internet in business and commerce has created a number of new business opportunities and the need for supporting models and platforms. One of these opportunities is information commerce (i-commerce), a special case of ecommerce focused on the purchase and sale of information as a commodity. In this paper we present an architecture for i-commerce systems using OPELIX (Open Personalized Electronic Information Commerce System) [11] as an example. OPELIX provides an open information commerce platform that enables enterprises to produce, sell, deliver, and manage information products and related services over the Internet. We focus on the notion of information marketplace, a virtual location that enables i-commerce, describe the business and domain model for an information marketplace, and discuss the role of intermediaries in this environment. The domain model is used as the basis for the software architecture of the OPELIX system. We discuss the characteristics of the OPELIX architecture and compare our approach to related work in the field

Reflecting on Experiential Learning in Marketing Education

© Westburn Publishers Ltd 2014. This is the preprint (pre peer-review) version of an article which has been published in its definitive form in Marketing Review, and has been posted by permission of Westburn Publishers Ltd for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in [Marketing Review, Vol.14, No.1, pp.97-108, http://dx.doi.org/10.1362/146934714X13948909473266"Experiential learning methods have become increasingly popular in marketing education. Factors underlying this trend are: the desire to respond to the changing higher education environment (the student-customer); the need to endow students with employability skills; the common sense assumption that since marketing is a practical activity, learning from experience makes sense; and, pedagogic methods designed around experiential learning theory which has been widely influential in recent decades. While not seeking to argue that experiential learning methods are ineffective in marketing education, this article argues that they should be used thoughtfully and where the learning goals and the cohort of students are likely to benefit from them. In particular, marketing educators should be wary of imposing an excessively high cognitive load on their students by expecting them to learn complex concepts from experiential learning methods that themselves have an intrinsically sharp learning curve, such as client consultancy projectsNon peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

An Audience Centred Approach to Business Process Reengineering

This paper describes a method for process modelling which is designed to provide guidance to the business process modeller. The method has evolved from our experience of attempting to apply software process modelling approaches to business processes. A major influence on the method has been our observations that a pragmatic approach to notation selection is required in order to maintain a meaningful dialogue with end-users. Business process modelling methods typically fall into two camps. General methods attempt to describe the managerial activities which surround the modelling itself (Coulson-Thomas, 94; GISIP, 95). Specific methods, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on the details of a particular notational approach. However, as with programming languages or design methods, no single notational approach is best suited to all problems. Ideally, the process modeller should be able to incorporate the appropriate notational approach into some coherent generic modelling method.This paper addresses the needs of the modeller at the detailed level without prescribing a specific notation. This is achieved by describing categories of modelling activities which the modeller should undertake within process modelling, and suggesting how notations may be used within these categories. Our method is generally applicable, and is illustrated here by models of processes within the Construction industry

UK Research Information Shared Service (UKRISS) Final Report, July 2014

The reporting of research information is a complex and expensive activity for research organisations (ROs). There is little alignment between funders of the reporting requests made to institutions and requests made to individual researchers about their research outputs and outcomes. This inevitably results in duplication and increased costs across the sector, whilst limiting the potential sharing and reuse of the information. The UK Research Information Shared Service (UKRISS) project conducted a feasibility and scoping study for the reporting of research information at a national level based on CERIF (Common European Research Information Format), with the objective of increasing efficiency, productivity and quality across the sector. The aim was to define and prototype solutions which are compelling, easy to use, have a low entry barrier, and support innovative information sharing and benchmarking. CERIF has emerged as the preferred format for expressing research information across Europe. To date, CERIF has been piloted for specific applications, but not as a format for reporting requirements across all UK ROs. The final report presents the work carried out by the UKRISS project, including requirements gathering, modelling and prototyping, as well as recommendation for sustainability. UKRISS was divided into two phases. Phase 1, mapping the reporting landscape, ran from March 2012 to December 2012. Phase 2, exploring delivery of potential solutions, began in February 2013 and ended in December 2013

Evaluating the strategic plans of public libraries : an inspection-based approach

For public libraries, as with most organisations, effective strategic planning is critical to longevity, facilitating cohesive and coordinated responses to ever present and ever changing political, economic, social, and technological (PEST) forces which shape and influence direction. However, strategic planning is widely recognised as a challenging activity, which can be both time consuming and unproductive, and there exists limited guidance regarding how to evaluate documented and disseminated strategic plans, particularly within the not-for-profit sector. In response, this research proposes and tests an inspection-based approach to the evaluation of strategic plans, based upon a rubric specifying the key attributes of each of the core components of a plan, combined with an appropriate assessment scale. The rubric provides a method to identify and assess completeness of strategic plan, extending to qualitative assessment of communication aspects such as specification and terminology, and synergistic aspects such as cohesion and integration. The method is successfully trialled across the devolved Scottish public library sector with the strategic plans of 28 of the 32 regional networks evaluated. 17 of 28 plans (61%) were found to be incomplete and/or to contain contradictory or uncoordinated components, with it recommended that Scottish public libraries improve not only completeness of plans, but also their precision, specificity, explicitness, coordination, and consistency, and overall mapping to library services. Recommendations are made for further widespread application of the rubric

Tour guiding, organisational culture and learning: lessons from an entrepreneurial company

This paper examines the impacts of organisational culture on the learning and development of tour guides. Drawing on a case study of a small entrepreneurial tour company, the paper considers the nature of the organisation's culture, the tours it provides, including their narrative contents and the processes of organisational learning and socialisation. The paper suggests that the development of a learning culture within such an organisation may benefit from the provision of appropriate learning opportunities among the guides and facilitators who coordinate guide development