Performance Measurement Indicators in the Healthcare Industry: A Systematic Review

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to explore and investigate the types of employee performance measurement systems applied in healthcare services and assess their efficiency in providing accurate measurement of the performance of healthcare workers across the various job types with focus on performance indicators to measure soft skills. Study Design and Methodology: A systematic search in discipline specific databases included PsychInfo, Medline, ABI/Inform, and Business Source Elite; and in multidisciplinary databases included Academic Search Elite, Health and Psychosocial Instruments, ProQuest, and Science Direct. The used search terms were “employee performance indicators”, “employee performance appraisal”, and “healthcare”. The search was limited to publications in English language without any restrictions on year of publication. The search was supplemented with an independent manual search of references of relevant studies and bibliographies of review articles. Results: A total of 23 articles met the inclusion criteria. Articles were classified into 3 categories: Performance measurement systems and programs comprise of 10 studies, evaluation and development of measuring tools includes 7 studies, and problems and gaps of measuring performance of medical practitioners included 6 studies. Majority of the studies (65.22%), 15 studies, are healthcare related. Conclusions: There was wide diversity in the applicable methods. However, there appears to be no comprehensive approach to performance evaluation in healthcare. The systematic review of published literature does not provide or identify a clear solution to the weakness of applicable employee performance appraisal systems in healthcare organizations. There is a literature gap in covering performance measurement systems for non-medical employees working in healthcare organizations and in discussing performance indicators for soft skills. The findings have supported the statement of problem and provided direction for future research that is needed to address the existing gap in performance measurement literature and contribute to evidence-informed decision-making in healthcare performance management

Using Natural Language Processing to Mine Multiple Perspectives from Social Media and Scientific Literature.

This thesis studies how Natural Language Processing techniques can be used to mine perspectives from textual data. The first part of the thesis focuses on analyzing the text exchanged by people who participate in discussions on social media sites. We particularly focus on threaded discussions that discuss ideological and political topics. The goal is to identify the different viewpoints that the discussants have with respect to the discussion topic. We use subjectivity and sentiment analysis techniques to identify the attitudes that the participants carry toward one another and toward the different aspects of the discussion topic. This involves identifying opinion expressions and their polarities, and identifying the targets of opinion. We use this information to represent discussions in one of two representations: discussant attitude vectors or signed attitude networks. We use data mining and network analysis techniques to analyze these representations to detect rifts in discussion groups and study how the discussants split into subgroups with contrasting opinions. In the second part of the thesis, we use linguistic analysis to mine scholars perspectives from scientific literature through the lens of citations. We analyze the text adjacent to reference anchors in scientific articles as a means to identify researchers' viewpoints toward previously published work. We propose methods for identifying, extracting, and cleaning citation text. We analyze this text to identify the purpose (author's intention) and polarity (author's sentiment) of citation. Finally, we present several applications that can benefit from this analysis such as generating multi-perspective summaries of scientific articles and predicting future prominence of publications.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99934/1/amjbara_1.pd

Evaluation and Improvement of Arbitration Procedures in the Engineering Arbitration Center in the Gaza Strip

Disputes in construction industry are normal and sometimes cannot be avoided. There are many methods to resolve disputes and arbitration is one of these methods. Arbitration is considered one of recently regulated dispute resolution methods in construction in the Gaza Strip. This study aims to evaluate and improve the Engineering Arbitration Center (EAC) procedures in the Gaza Strip. This aim achieved by exploring the acceptance level of construction parties, identifying strengths and weaknesses in EAC arbitration procedures and then suggesting improvements. In this research the current EAC engineering arbitration procedures in the Gaza Strip is investigated and compared to an international and regional arbitration institutions. Fifty questionnaires were distributed to dispute parties in arbitrated cases in EAC. Results of 34 questionnaires of respondents and 10 interviews with arbitration experts concluded that: It is found that costs and time of arbitration in EAC are not satisfying by disputants. It is also found that arbitration fees are preferred to be paid commensurately with the value of claims which are awarded to each of the dispute parties with a minimum must be paid by each dispute party. Respondents of the questionnaire preferred when forming arbitral tribunal that each of the dispute parties choose an arbitrator from the list of names of arbitrators determined by EAC, then the parties agree to the arbitral tribunal president in the case of three arbitrators. It is found that the main obstacles of arbitration extent are: lack of sufficient awareness of the dispute parties in principles and procedures of arbitration, not to promote members of the EAC by experts in the field of arbitral justice and lack of commitment of one of the dispute parties to cover the financial obligations required for EAC. It is found that there are high level of acceptance with arbitration procedures in EAC as 91% of respondents will reconsider EAC for resolution in future disputes. This study recommended that the arbitration procedures in EAC should be evaluated periodically for improvements and the website of the EAC should be activated and developed to publish articles about EAC efforts, services and arbitration magazine should be issued periodically. It is also recommended that EAC should cooperate with Palestinian Union of Contractors to conduct workshops and seminars to increase the contractors awareness of arbitration. Training courses for adopted arbitrators in EAC and new arbitrators should be conducted and focusing on means and techniques to make arbitration less costly for the dispute parties. Finally arbitration clauses to arbitrate any dispute at EAC should be contained in local construction contracts

Subgroup Detection in Ideological Discussions

The rapid and continuous growth of social networking sites has led to the emergence of many communities of communicating groups. Many of these groups discuss ideological and political topics. It is not uncommon that the participants in such discussions split into two or more subgroups. The members of each subgroup share the same opinion toward the discussion topic and are more likely to agree with members of the same subgroup and disagree with members from opposing subgroups. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for automatically detecting discussant subgroups in online communities. We analyze the text exchanged between the participants of a discussion to identify the attitude they carry toward each other and towards the various aspects of the discussion topic. We use attitude predictions to construct an attitude vector for each discussant. We use clustering techniques to cluster these vectors and, hence, determine the subgroup membership of each participant. We compare our methods to text clustering and other baselines, and show that our method achieves promising results

Strategies of resistance and the significance of hope in Palestinian literature and film

The starting point of this dissertation is that biopolitics is widely practiced in occupied Palestine, raising the question of the extent to which resistance takes a biopolitical form. I will analyse how iterations of the body, stationary or in motion, have changed in colonial occupied Palestine and for people living in exile vis-à-vis postcolonial resistance strategies and hope. This will be achieved by examining novellas, poetry, images, film, and prison literature produced by the Palestinian communities from 1948 onwards. The dissertation contributes to the analysis of what I term thin and thick resistance, which can constitute either separate or composite strategies to resistance praxis. While thin resistance instils endurance of hardship, resilience in outlook and behaviour, such as non-violent resistance or Sumud in Palestinian context, thick resistance takes a violent approach. This dissertation will consider the distinction between violent and the non-violent resistance but will also engage purposefully in elements that constitute thin and thick strategies of anti-colonial and postcolonial resistance. Both thin and thick resistance are strategic options for those aiming for the survival and emancipation of Palestinians. What I posit here is the notion of hope in the Palestinian cultural output that I examine, and its importance in determining the strategy of resistance Palestinians undertake. Whilst I have drawn on theoretical and sociological accounts of biopolitics, liminality, and resistance, my dissertation will make a case for the importance of studying biopolitics in the context of literary texts. These have a dual aspect: they represent the specificity of biopolitics in their locally inflected ways. They additionally constitute a non-biopolitical mode of resistance in that they confront the struggles they write of through the imagination. Hope, I will argue, is an imaginative approach, so there is a way in which literature may be aligned with thin resistance. In the postcolonial context, the written or spoken word is often presented as an alternative to violence. Simultaneously, the written or spoken word, for example, when sites of memory and resistance are translated into words have succeeded at mobilising both thin and thick resistance. This suggests that the spoken and written word are not passive but are instigative and mobilising. They become a recourse of resistance

Splitting Arabic Texts into Elementary Discourse Units

International audienceIn this article, we propose the first work that investigates the feasibility of Arabic discourse segmentation into elementary discourse units within the segmented discourse representation theory framework. We first describe our annotation scheme that defines a set of principles to guide the segmentation process. Two corpora have been annotated according to this scheme: elementary school textbooks and newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank. Then, we propose a multiclass supervised learning approach that predicts nested units. Our approach uses a combination of punctuation, morphological, lexical, and shallow syntactic features. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We show that an extensive morphological analysis is crucial to achieve good results in both corpora. In addition, we show that adding chunks does not boost the performance of our system

Development of Assessment Tool to Measure Soft Skills of Healthcare Providers

BACKGROUND: The objective of the study is to develop and validate an assessment tool to measure soft skills in the performance of healthcare providers during patient encounters in primary care settings. The assessment tool will address a gap in performance measurement systems of healthcare providers and patient surveys about soft skills that most influence the way service is delivered and perceived during provider-patient interactions. In this study, the Iceberg Model of Managerial Competencies was used to define the construct and develop a conceptual model of soft skills. Soft skills are commonly referred to as bedside manner. METHODS: The study implemented a mixed methods approach. The first phase used qualitative focus groups and semi-structured personal interviews to collect primary data from 62 participants from users (n=35) and providers (n=27) of healthcare services using a purposeful and snowball sampling strategies. Quantitative surveys were utilized to examine content and face validity. The first refined draft of the assessment tool was developed and obtained content and face validity through conducting qualitative focus groups and semi-structured personal interviews with six subject matter experts and a quantitative survey of 14 individuals representing users of healthcare services. Subject matter experts were recruited using purposeful sampling strategy, and users of healthcare services were recruited using availability sample from the target population. Ongoing data collection using a quantitative survey will further inform the factorial structure of the scale. RESULTS: Ten soft skills were identified as the most essential soft skills for provider-patient interaction in primary care setting. A pool of 198 items were generated from the content analysis process. The final refined draft of the assessment tool consists of 49 items rated on 6-point Likert-type scale, measuring Verbal (personal) and non-verbal communication (15 items), empathy (5 items), compassion (4 items), caring (6 items), listening (5 items), respect (4 items), friendliness (4 items), and trust (6 items). CONCLUSION: The scale obtained excellent content validity with S-CVI/Ave = .96, and S-CVI/UA = .92. Psychometric evaluation of score reliability and construct validity for the final draft of the assessment tool will be reported.N