Business Process Redesign in the Perioperative Process: A Case Perspective for Digital Transformation

This case study investigates business process redesign within the perioperative process as a method to achieve digital transformation. Specific perioperative sub-processes are targeted for re-design and digitalization, which yield improvement. Based on a 184-month longitudinal study of a large 1,157 registered-bed academic medical center, the observed effects are viewed through a lens of information technology (IT) impact on core capabilities and core strategy to yield a digital transformation framework that supports patient-centric improvement across perioperative sub-processes. This research identifies existing limitations, potential capabilities, and subsequent contextual understanding to minimize perioperative process complexity, target opportunity for improvement, and ultimately yield improved capabilities. Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis applied to specific perioperative patient-centric data collected within integrated hospital information systems yield the organizational resource for process management and control. Conclusions include theoretical and practical implications as well as study limitations

The North American coach tourist to Ireland: a factor analysis approach

The objective of this paper is to identify the most significant travel behaviours and characteristics of North American coach tourists visiting Ireland. The data, identifying travel behaviours and characteristics, such as travel constraints, motivation, activities, accommodation attributes, life focus and personality traits was elucidated from questionnaires (n = 741) distributed to North American coach tourists that visited Ireland between June 2007 and March 2008. Factor analysis, which is a statistical technique that uses correlations between variables to determine the underlying dimensions represented by the variables, is used to identify the most significant factors that have common characteristics amongst the tourists. Results show, over 59% of the coach tourists surveyed are under 65 years. Coach tourists are largely active individuals with a strong propensity for cycling. They tend to be culturally aware and are drawn to historical destinations. They have a desire to learn new things. Fear of terrorism is their main travel constraint. They focus on sharing their beliefs with others. Finally, those surveyed tend to be independent and family orientated. These findings suggest tourism policies can now be directed more succinctly to cater for a specific type of coach tourist visiting Ireland rather than supplying a generic tourist product. The findings also help target future niche markets of coach tourism by suggesting eight coach tour niches worthy of further research. The active coach tourist: the spa retreat tours: the spiritual tourist: the historical coach tours: the health conscious coach tourist: the adult-only coach tourist: the family orientated coach tourist and the luxurious coach tourist

Does a food for education program affect school outcomes? The Bangladesh case

The Food for Education (FFE) program was introduced to Bangladesh in 1993. This paper evaluates the effect of this program on school participation and duration of schooling using a household survey data collected in 2000, after 7 years of operation of the program. Using propensity score matching combined with difference-in-differences methodologies we estimate the average effect of FFE eligibility on the schooling outcomes. We found that the program is successful in that the eligible children on average have 15 to 27 per cent higher school participation rates, relative to their counterfactuals who were not but would have been eligible for the program. Conditional on school participation, participants also stay at school 0.7 to 1.05 years longer than their counterfactual

Promoting Equity in Contexts of Work Intensification: A Principal’s Challenge

This case describes the experience of a principal named Jade working in a diverse school in South Central Ontario. A teacher in Jade’s school had been confronted by parents and a school board trustee for reading a book to their class about a family with two moms. The teacher eventually decided to switch schools, no longer feeling safe or welcome in the school. Jade would have liked to be more involved in the issue, but given her mounting workload found it difficult to devote as much time as she would have liked. This case is a starting point for discussion with educational leaders and teachers about the challenges of leading and teaching for social justice in a context where many are experiencing work intensification

Integrating Ecological and Engineering Concepts of Resilience in Microbial Communities

Many definitions of resilience have been proffered for natural and engineered ecosystems, but a conceptual consensus on resilience in microbial communities is still lacking. We argue that the disconnect largely results from the wide variance in microbial community complexity, which range from compositionally simple synthetic consortia to complex natural communities, and divergence between the typical practical outcomes emphasized by ecologists and engineers. Viewing microbial communities as elasto-plastic systems that undergo both recoverable and unrecoverable transitions, we argue that this gap between the engineering and ecological definitions of resilience stems from their respective emphases on elastic and plastic deformation, respectively. We propose that the two concepts may be fundamentally united around the resilience of function rather than state in microbial communities and the regularity in the relationship between environmental variation and a community\u27s functional response. Furthermore, we posit that functional resilience is an intrinsic property of microbial communities and suggest that state changes in response to environmental variation may be a key mechanism driving functional resilience in microbial communities