The Impact of Breast Cancer Screening on Population Health

Breast cancer is an important public health problem with an estimated number of 1.38 million breast cancer cases and 458,000 deaths from the disease yearly worldwide. Randomized trials have shown that mammography screening significantly reduces breast cancer mortality. Besides the benefits in terms of lives saved, mammography screening is, however, also associated with harms, such as false-positive test results and overdiagnosis. This thesis describes the impact of breast cancer screening in the population and compares the effects to the effects of other interventions. We found that mammography screening has had a substantial impact on breast cancer mortality in the U.S. and is projected to continue to do so in the future. Screening women biennially from age 50 to 74 years leads to a favorable balance between benefits and harms. More intensive screening (either extending the age ranges or increasing the screenin

Industry Participation in Educating Enterprise Resource Planning

During the last two decades many businesses around the world have adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Consequently the growth in the number of ERP implementations has had an enormous impact on the demand for ERP skills. This is one of the main reasons that many universities have adopted ERP in their curriculum. However many universities have struggled with the complexity, considerable cost and effort involved with the use of ERP and the way in which to incorporate it into the curriculum. This paper describes a joint effort by industry and the HU University of Applied Science in the Netherlands at designing an ERP curriculum that doesn’t have these problems and at the same time bridges the gap between skills taught by academia and those valued by industr

End-users Compliance to the Information Security Policy: A Comparison of Motivational Factors

Business information, held within information systems, is critical for most organizations. To protect these critical information assets, security controls should be deployed which might come as a hindrance for the end-users. The Information Security Policies (ISP) give direction to their behaviors. Organizations can focus on conditions likely to promote so-called motivational factors influencing the end-users intentions to perform the desired behavior of compliance to ISP in order to protect these information assets. In total, six motivational factors, applicable to intentions on compliance, are found during research and are measured within five organizational contexts. From the measurements and analysis is learned, that the degree to which these factors relate differs per factor and per context. Two of these factors were found to always relate in such degree to compliance intentions that even without measuring the degree for a particular organization, applying these factors can be very effective for any organization or context. The other four factors have shown to be effective within particular context(s) meaning measurement of the context is needed before utilizing these factors within an organization to optimize the effect of efforts

Success Factors of Business Process Management Systems Implementation

In this research (critical) success factors for Business Process Management Systems implementation are identified and qualitatively validated. Furthermore a list of critical success factors is constructed. Based on the identified factors a BPMS implementation approach is suggested. Future research consists of situationally considering the success factors in relation to phases in the implementation approach

A Situational Implementation Method for Business Process Management Systems

For the integrated implementation of Business Process Management and supporting information systems many methods are available. Most of these methods, however, apply a one-size fits all approach and do not take into account the specific situation of the organization in which an information system is to be implemented. These situational factors, however, strongly determine the success of any implementation project. In this paper a method is provided that establishes situational factors of and their influence on implementation methods. The provided method enables a more successful implementation project, because the project team can create a more suitable implementation method for business process management system implementation projects

United We Stand? Exploring the Willingness to Cooperate Amongst Open Source Service Providers

Open Source Software (OSS) is an increasingly hot topic in the business domain. The adoption of OSS in organizations has experienced an increasing uptake in the last decade. One of the key benefits mentioned is the unlimited access to the source code, which enables large communities to continuously improve a software application and prevents vendor lock-in. How attractive these benefits may be, the market for OSS however remains limited. This paper reports a study, undertaken in the Netherlands, amongst 206 Open Source Software Service providers (with a 34% response rate) to determine whether service providers wanted to cooperate in an Association that will set quality levels and guarantees to its members and their customers

Using the Delphi Method to Identify Hospital-Specific Business Process Management Capabilities in The Netherlands

Business Process Management (BPM) is an important discipline for organisations that are desiring quality improvement. Many models for assessing, comparing and improving the maturity of organisational BPM are found in literature. An effective BPM Maturity Model should contain a validated set of capability areas specific to the application domain. We attempt to fill a gap by providing a model specific to the hospital industry. This paper presents the first phase in the development of such a model. For this we use the Delphi Method, a multi-round technique for collecting rich data and gaining consensus among a panel of experts. Based on the opinions provided by experts in hospitals and academia in The Netherlands, we identify relevant and domain-specific capabilities for improving BPM maturity in the Dutch hospital industry. Hospitals are characterised by complex, multidisciplinary processes. Our findings reflect that capabilities related to people and organisational culture are most important for achieving BPM maturity