Design of a Guideline for a Strategy Process of medium-sized Companies

Companies with a clear, documented strategy perform better than their competitors without a strategy. Nevertheless, the strategy process confronts medium-sized companies (250-3,000 employees) with major challenges while many of them do not have a clear strategy process. Reasons for that can be the focus on operations and thus lack of time and resources, missing methods knowledge, or the underestimation of the value of a strategy. In times of a structural change in an industry, as we see it currently for example with the electrification of the automotive industry, a strategy becomes even more important. The automotive supplier industry alone employs around 150,000 people just in medium-sized companies in Germany. This paper aims to design a guideline that supports medium-sized companies to define their long-term goals and in the implementation of their derived strategy. Based on a literature review and 16 expert interviews a guideline was developed that contains templates to document the strategy process and a process model including checklists to fill the templates. The guideline was initially evaluated against the defined success factors in a medium-sized company

The frequency of asthma exacerbations and healthcare utilization in patients with asthma from the UK and USA

Asthma exacerbations are frequent in patients with severe disease. This report describes results from two retrospective cohort studies describing exacerbation frequency and risk, emergency department (ED)/hospital re-admissions, and asthma-related costs by asthma severity in the US and UK