Suchergebnisse

Health‐care systems increasingly collect and aggregate patient data from electronic medical record systems to aid in their decision making. Community‐based organizations that support patients' health and well‐being have been left behind in the development and use of technologies for coordinating patient care, despite policies that encourage cross‐sector coordination. This article presents the author's work as a rhetorician on a community‐engaged action research project to seek grant funding and health‐care partners to implement a tool that enables community‐based organization professionals to connect to health‐care providers to coordinate care for under‐resourced older adult patients. The team's practices from the project are used to inform a techne, or set of rhetorical strategies, for community‐based organizations to participate in population health management initiatives. Understanding these strategies as a techne to train other community‐based organizations to participate in cross‐sector initiatives may be critical to effectuating the goals of the Affordable Care Act and other health policies that seek to improve population‐level health outcomes.

AbstractThis paper investigates the coordination between government organizations and nongovernmental, voluntary organizations in Thailand. The contributions, the nature and the cooperation mechanisms of development NGOs are considered on the basis of field data collected from local government and NGO officers working in rural development. Based on theoretical considerations, an overview of coordination is developed within the framework of development in the country. The problems of coordination boil down to a fundamental mistrust of the NGOs' style of operation in spite of the personal relationships that are often the only basis for coordination attempts. While decentralization efforts will improve the situation, a more direct policy, as well as plan formulation and implementation management efforts, will be needed to arrive at a mutually reinforced effort in rural development.

Monetary policy analysts often rely on rules-of-thumb, such as the Taylor rule, to describe historical monetary policy decisions and to compare current policy to historical norms. Analysis along these lines also permits evaluation of episodes where policy may have deviated from a simple rule and examination of the reasons behind such deviations. One interesting question is whether such rules-of-thumb should draw on policymakers' forecasts of key variables such as inflation and unemployment or on observed outcomes. Importantly, deviations of the policy from the prescriptions of a Taylor rule that relies on outcomes may be due to systematic responses to information captured in policymakers' own projections. We investigate this proposition in the context of FOMC policy decisions over the past 20 years using publicly available FOMC projections from the biannual monetary policy reports to the Congress (Humphrey-Hawkins reports). Our results indicate that FOMC decisions can indeed be predominantly explained in terms of the FOMC's own projections rather than observed outcomes. Thus, a forecast-based rule-of-thumb better characterizes FOMC decision-making. We also confirm that many of the apparent deviations of the federal funds rate from an outcome-based Taylor-style rule may be considered systematic responses to information contained in FOMC projections.