Advances in medical knowledge and technology, escalating healthcare costs, and rising patient expectations and involvement in their care are changing the management of chronic disease. Here, we describe how ParkinsonNet, an innovative regional network introduced in the Netherlands in 2004, has improved the quality of care and reduced the healthcare costs of patients with Parkinson’s disease. Th...

Multi-sided platforms (MSPs), which bring together two or more interdependent groups of customers, have recently risen to economic and business prominence in many industries. This paper first lays out a simple micro-founded framework which aims to organize academic and managerial thinking about MSPs. It argues that any MSP performs one or both among two fundamental functions: reducing search co...

To succeed, health care reform must slow spending growth while improving quality. We propose a new approach to help achieve more integrated and efficient care by fostering local organizational accountability for quality and costs through performance measurement and "shared savings" payment reform. The approach is practical and feasible: it is voluntary for providers, builds on current referral ...

Larger size networks require DSM coherence protocols which scale well. Fault-tolerance in terms of high availability is required for data access and for uninterrupted DSM service since large-scale environments have a greater number of potentially malfunctioning components. We present a new class of coherence protocols for DSM systems whose instances o er highly available access to shared data a...

In this paper, we introduce a special issue about unique and shared mechanisms underlying the performance limitations observed in dual tasks. In particular, the relationship between task-switching costs, the attentional-blink effect, and the psychological refractory period effect is reviewed. These costs are traditionally attributed to fixed and unique capacity limitations for task set reconfig...

Integrating working and learning is seen as a desirable alternative to traditional training regimes. An integrated approach to working and learning is more gradual, contextual, problem oriented and cost effective. Knowledge technology aims to catalyze workplace learning, but requires the right organisational culture and brings additional costs regarding the articulation, representation and tran...

In these financial difficult years many European governments used global ceilings to control costs of health services. Two scenarios are thinkable. The first is that all individual providers get a budget for their own costs: general practitioners, specialists, hospitals, nursing homes and mental health institutes. The second scenario is to work with global budgets for health care providers serv...

It has been suggested that actors co-represent a shared task context when they perform a task in a joint fashion. The present study examined the possibility of co-representation in joint task switching, in which two actors shared two tasks that switched randomly across trials. Experiment 1 showed that when an actor performed the tasks individually, switch costs were obtained if the actors respo...

As more and more organizations consider moving their applications and data from dedicated hosting infrastructure, which they own and operate, to shared infrastructure leased from ‘the cloud’, security remains a key sticking point. Tenants of cloud hosting providers have substantially less control over the construction, operation, and auditing of infrastructure they lease than infrastructure the...