Number Of Service Providers Research Articles

The paradigm shift in healthcare — Overcoming challenges in giving patients access to their electronic records

As the delivery of healthcare by an increasing number of service providers becomes more complex, there is an increasing need for patients to understand their treatment plans and to compare them with what they should expect to receive. Changes in society mean that patients may now have the opportunity and desire to view their electronic health record and share it with others electronically. This is the basis of the paradigm shift in healthcare. But patients, clinicians and managers need to consider how to do this safely and responsibly. There are a number of challenges that need to be overcome including informing patients and empowering them, understanding the financial model to support this as well as the change management and data protection issues, understanding how information is recorded in the record, producing tools to encourage patients to be active participants, reducing the digital divide, enabling easy identification of high-quality information, producing a framework for enabling safe sharing of information, understanding the role of a local care record development board which helps to manage the change, enabling semantic interoperability in a global market and understanding how we can assess its success. This heralds a new era of 'real-time digital medicine'.

A case study on measuring the performance of a network of service providers for an international airline

The traditional Performance Measurement System (PMS) generally focuses on the performance of one single entity, such as at the firm level. Airlines outsource most engineering functions to a number of experienced service providers. The developed PMS is referred to as 'Individual PMS' and cannot be directly applied to a collaboration network. The Individual PMS mainly takes care of the performance of an individual company and may overlook the ultimate network performance. The 'Aggregate PMS' approach, capable of assessing and managing the network performance, is difficult to develop. This paper articulates a research method for deploying Aggregate PMS in the airline with a number of service providers as the partners within the collaboration network. The method is validated with a prototype. Early results indicate that the method shows promise. It has relevance to local aviation authorities for measuring the safety performance of airlines.

Family Planning Clinic Services in the United States, 1981

In the first 13 years after the federal government initiated support for family planning clinic services, there was a fivefold increase in the number of U.S. women obtaining these services from organized programs, from about 860,000 in 1968 to 4.6 million in 1981. This increase was due to the growth in the number of service providers and in the average number of clients served by each agency. Between 1968 and 1981, the number of provider agencies rose from about 1,400 separate agencies operating 1,800 clinics to 2,500 agencies administering 5,000 clinics. The average number of patients served by each agency increased from 600 to 1,800. Family planning clinics have continued to serve primarily low-income women; in 1981, four-fifths of the women served, or 3.7 million, had low incomes. In addition, an estimated 1.8 million low-income women obtained family planning services from private physicians. Thus, about 58 percent of the 9.5 million low-income women who were exposed to the risk of having an unintended pregnancy in 1981 made a contraceptive visit in that year; 39 percent went to clinics and 19 percent visited private physicians. Five million women 19 years of age or younger were at risk of unintended pregnancy in 1981; of these, 2.9 million (57 percent) obtained medically supervised family planning services--30 percent from organized programs and 27 percent from private physicians. Family planning clinic patients obtained contraceptive care from a variety of public and private health agencies in 1981.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Why Are the Streets So Dirty? Social Psychological and Stratification Factors in the Decline of Municipal Services

Although objective measures of the decline of municipal services are hard to obtain and harder to interpret, there is a strong subjective sense that municipal services have declined from the level of some previous time. This sentiment is reinforced by the increase in municipal budgets and in serviceability ratios (number of service providers per 10,000 of population) in virtually all municipal service divisions. I propose that part of the decline in services can be explained by changes in the relative status of providers and consumers of services in many cities. Two aspects of status are pertinent. First, in earlier years, municipal service providers had by-and-large less or at least not very much higher status than those to whom they provided services. Thus service to others by these lower status providers conformed with sociological notions of deference and compliance with the interests and wishes of those of higher status. With the shift in population toward black and Hispanic in many central cities, service providers are now of clearly higher status than many consumers of services. This militates against service provision since it violates the proper direction of flow of benefits. A second status consideration is that recent relatively rapid increases in income for municipal service workers have temporarily elevated self-conceptions and status to the point where dirtywork can now be shunned as incompatible with the new status level. This too militates against the provision of service since much of the municipal service task consists of dirty work. Finally, in certain municipal service arenas, the usually higher status white group is at the mercy of the usually lower status black and Hispanic group. A form of class warfare ensues which also means lesser service. A rationale for a solution is proposed. *Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, 1978. I want to thank Arnold Birenbaum, Roslyn Bologh, Edgar Mills, Brian O'Connell, and Ino Rossi for helpful suggestions. ? 1979, University of North Carolina Press. 0037-7732/79/020422-42$02.10