Personalisation, Participation and Care

Personalisation services are developing in England as a social policy response to user demands for more tailored, effective and flexible forms of health and social care support. Across England and Wales, this process is being implemented under the personalization which is also seen as a vehicle for promoting service user rights through increasing participation, empowerment and control while also promoting self-restraint by having users manage the costs of their health and social care. This paper reviews the existing research evidence for personalization, albeit limited, and identifies themes for future research

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Maximizing Competency Education and Blended Learning: Insights from Experts

In May 2014, CompetencyWorks brought together twenty-three technical assistance providers to examine their catalytic role in implementing next generation learning models, share each other's knowledge and expertise about blended learning and competency education, and discuss next steps to move the field forward with a focus on equity and quality. Our strategy maintains that by building the knowledge and networks of technical assistance providers, these groups can play an even more catalytic role in advancing the field. The objective of the convening was to help educate and level set the understanding of competency education and its design elements, as well as to build knowledge about using blended learning modalities within competency-based environments. This paper attempts to draw together the wide-ranging conversations from the convening to provide background knowledge for educators to understand what it will take to transform from traditional to personalized, competency-based systems that take full advantage of blended learning

Niche products, generic products, and consumer search

We endogenize product differentiation in a model of sequential search with random firm-consumer match value à la Wolinsky (1986) and Anderson and Renault (1999). We focus on a product design choice by which a firm can control the dispersion of consumer valuations for its product; we interpret low dispersion products as ‘generic’ and high dispersion products as ‘nichy.’ Equilibrium product design depends on a feedback loop: when reservation utility is high (low), the marginal customer’s match improves (worsens) with more nichy products, encouraging high (low) differentiation by firms. In turn, when firms offer more nichy products, this induces more intense search; depending on search costs, this could raise or lower consumers’ reservation utility. Remarkably, when the match distribution satisfies a hazard rate condition, firm and consumer interests align: equilibrium product design always adjusts to the level that maximizes utility. When this condition is not met, either multiple equilibria (one nichy, the other generic) or one asymmetric equilibrium (generic and nichy firms coexist) can arise; we argue that the former is more likely for common specifications of consumer preferences.product differentiation; product design; search

Logistics Information and Knowledge Management Issues in Humanitarian Aid Organizations

In this paper, we assess the need for logistics information and knowledge management in humanitarian aid organizations. To do so, we combine literature sources with an extensive case study that we conducted at Médecins sans Frontières–Holland, which is following a trajectory to improve logistics information management within the organization. We observed that logistics information and logistics knowledge management has not yet matured. We indicate how, by making use of knowledge management strategies such as ‘personalization’ and ‘codification’, this can be improved.Humanitarian aid organizations;Knowledge management;Logistics information

What’s in a name: conceptions of personalized medicine and their ethical implications

Medicine is said to be moving rapidly down the road towards personalization, but it is not entirely clear how we are to understand this term, or its implications for ethics. In understanding the concept of personalized medicine there are multiple possible interpretations of ‘personalization’ at stake. These may in turn presuppose different concepts of ‘person’, with resulting variations in the ethical implications

Nursing Voice

https://scholarlyworks.lvhn.org/nursing_voice/1026/thumbnail.jp

The many faces of Botox: Beauty, crisis, and cosmeceuticals in Greece

This thesis is a portrait of Greek society through the prism of cosmetic beauty, during the period of financial austerity following the country’s entry into a debt-restructuring programme. Based on field research carried out in privately owned cosmetic-medical spaces for fourteen months, it focuses on the consumption of cosmetic pharmaceuticals (‘cosmeceuticals’), such as Botox, fillers, and other non-surgical technologies, and examines how Greek specialists and individuals view these products within a philosophy of healing and care. In treating ‘cosmeceuticals’ as a medical field in their own right (separated from ‘cosmetic surgery’), this thesis highlights the ways in which cosmeceuticals affect the Greek women who consume them, and the kind of personalized characteristics these individuals bestow on cosmeceuticals in order to render them more familiar. These make up the ‘many faces’ of Botox, an expression that is meant to capture the range of figurative uses, associations, characterizations and properties that patients attribute to such treatments. I furthermore explore how these associations are deeply personal yet simultaneously socially potent, for they create bonds between patient, drug, and physician. As this thesis aims to contribute to the existing anthropological work on Greece through the prism of beauty, I maintain that beauty and other related concerns are meaningful matters, forming the ‘depth’ as much as the ‘surface’ of life in Greece, even during ‘austerity’

Ungiven:Philanthropy as critique

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given

A Sustainable Alzheimer\u27s Garden - Creating Outdoor Spaces at Long-Term Alzheimer Care Facilities

Gardens built specifically for those with Alzheimer\u27s disease are designed with the intention to improve the quality of life for the patient, caregivers and family. The focus on human health is built into Alzheimer\u27s garden design. This project summarizes recent literature and establishes ten elements necessary in the design of an Alzheimer\u27s garden and seeks to relate those ten elements to sustainability by focusing on relatable sections from the Sustainable Sites Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009. The Alzheimer\u27s garden design elements and principles on sustainability are then applied to a design for a Sustainable Alzheimer\u27s Garden at a long-term care facility, specifically Western Massachusetts Hospital located in Westfield, MA