Making Diabetes Electronic Medical Record Data Actionable: Promoting Benchmarking and Population Health Improvement Using the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Portal

   This article describes how the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative leverages an innovative web platform, the QI Portal, to gather and store electronic medical record (EMR) data to promote benchmarking and population health improvement in a type 1 diabetes learning health system. The authors explain the value of the QI Portal, the process for mapping center-level data from EMRs using standardized data specifications, and the QI Portal’s unique features for advancing population health.</p

Japanese Retailing Through the 1990s: Retailer Performance in a Decade of Slow Growth

The development of Japanese retailing through the 1990s is used to illustrate the applicability of a Europe-based growth model in a recessionary market. Through the 1990s the Japanese economy suffered low growth and periods of recession, after strong growth through the 1980s. Retail sales in the 1990s increased only slightly whilst floorspace developments begun in the 1980s and the result of retailer expansion strategies generated increased retail capacity. Large retailers pursued strategies of opening more stores in order to generate sales, but this proved disastrous and resulted in lower productivity, high levels of debt, low levels of innovation and consequential need to restructure. General merchandise and department-store retailers were slow to see the need to restructure and innovate. In contrast, three groups of retailers obtained competitive advantages from the recession, namely retailers who responded quickly to emergent market segments, foreign retailers and e-retailers. The strategic responses to recession and the reasons behind these responses are illustrated and suggestions made on how the experiences of the 1990s will affect development in the early 2000s. Implications of the retailers' behaviour are indicated for retailer strategies, the restructuring of the sector and for research on strategy and structural change