Physician incentive plan boosts physician/patient satisfaction. 5-year-old plan at priority health shows success

Physician involvement is crucial to creating a healthy physician incentive program. Look at how one large, Michigan-based managed care organization established their program.     

Wandering in the desert. Lessons from a life in health care

A physician executive who's worked in many different areas of health care explains the nearly universal problems he's encountered with the "broken" system. He also suggests ways to fix it.     

Looking After Children: implications for social work education

Pilot schemes demonstrated a wide range of areas in which the Looking After Children materials might be used in social work training, both as part of the academic and the practice curriculum.     

Listening and Referring to Voices: Students' Repertory in Educational Settings

When we construct our knowledge in educational settings we usually listen to many different voices, mediated through teachers, classmates, books, films, and so on. Eight students in teacher training were videotaped for 12 hours of group talks with a tutor over a six-month period. The overall purpose of the study was to describe the polyphonic nature of the discursive field of education and the interplay between various contexts and contextual resources in that social interaction.

The concept of intertextuality is adopted as a method to identify the polyphony of different voices. The explicit reported long-term listening is called the student's voice response, showing the repertory of contextual resources in use. Results from the study indicate that some of the students have a broad and some a narrow listening repertory when it comes to reported listening. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Spatial and Temporal Aspects of the Density-Distance Relationship

Abstract

Numerous studies of the relationship between urban population density and distance from the city's center have shown that: (1) Cross-sectionally, the relationship between density and distance is negative, such that density crests in the interior of the city and declines toward the periphery. (2) Longitudinally, the slope of the density-distance relationship becomes flatter as central densities decline as neighborhoods age and thin and as fringe areas develop and increase in population. Most studies have worked with the total relationship between density and distance, ignoring cross-sectional and longitudinal variants from the general pattern for subareas of the metropolis. Large cities seldom develop uniformily in concentric patterns focused upon the CBD. More typical is the axial pattern described by Hurd or the sectoral pattern by Hoyt in which development is axial along principal arteries of transportation with inner-axial areas developing at later points in time. This paper pursues intra-urban differences in growth and development as expressed in the density-distance relationship. Our focus is on between-sector differences in the density-distance relationship at given points in time and upon temporal differences in the relationship through time for individual sectors. Our aim is to specify in a more detailed fashion the link between general urban dynamics and the changing density-distance relationship. The data are for the Cleveland metropolitan area, 1930–1970.     

Social License to Operate in Crowdfunding Campaigns

Organizations and individuals need to engage their communities to gain the social license to operate (SLO). In crowdfunding, SLO is reflected in funding by the members of communities of interest around crowdfunding campaigns. Thus campaign creators’ success relies on obtaining SLO from their communities. This article examines how crowdfunding campaign creators engage their communities to gain and maintain SLO to secure funding for their campaigns. Content analysis of 68 successful and unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns shows how successful campaign creators build their communities by the use of weak ties and have abundant relational and episodic engagement with their communities to obtain SLO. The results also show how successful campaign creators practice dialogic engagement to maintain their SLO over time. This study expands public relations to crowdfunding by framing crowdfunding as a community engagement practice and operationalizing SLO as tangible funding.