Medicare payment: how low it will go and how to prepare

Hospitals should begin preparing now for a decade of reductions in Medicare payment with strategies aimed at: Partnering with clinical leadership, Performing detailed margin analysis, Engaging with service line managers and physicians, Revamping care coordination, Ensuring efficient operating room utilization, Improving emergency department operations.     

The hospital: how will it survive?

The federal government is under pressure to implement and enforce a program to provide economic and social relief from the rapidly escalating health care costs which now consume 8.5% of the Gross National Product. Glick predicts that within the next twenty years, the character of health care institutions will be reshaped and only the most adaptable hospitals, health maintenance organizations and health-related governmental organizations will survive. He urges hospitals to develop appropriate strategies to deal with the problems of cost-containment, state-operated cost review and control agencies, and the competition for limited health care resources. The author warns the health care industry that if it does not adjust to these changes, it runs the risk of becoming heavily rgulated. It is suggested that health care institutions be integrated into comprehensive health care systems and the article includes a model for assigning patients to medical care facilities on a regional basis. Glick forecasts that hospitals will enter into a competition for survival, resulting in mergers of some and the closing of others. He believes that as the number of health care institutions decreases, the remaining ones will become more specialized and geographically dispersed.     

Balancing act: how to capture knowledge without killing it

Everyone knows that the way things are formally organized in most companies (their processes) is not the same as the way things are actually done (their practices). The difference between the two creates tension that can be very difficult for managers to handle. Lean too much toward practice and new ideas may bubble up and evaporate for lack of a structure to harness them. Lean too much toward process and you may get no new ideas at all. The goal, then, is to tap into the creativity at work in every layer of an organization with a combination of process and practice. Take, for example, the community of people who fix Xerox machines. Large machines, it turns out, are not as predictable as Xerox's documentation would suggest. So when following the service manual is not enough, the reps come together--over breakfast, at breaks, at the end of the day--and talk about their own best practices. So far so good. But Xerox goes a step further. It has set up a process similar to an academic peer-review system to gather, vet, and share those best practices across the company. The reps get much-welcome recognition for their creativity, and local best practices are deployed companywide. Dot-com companies are a hotbed of innovative practices. But as they mature, they, like Xerox, may find that they need seasoned managers who can harness those practices through the judicious application of constructive processes.     

原油期货离中国有多远?

原油作为一种十分敏感的战略性物资,它与国际经济、政治关系极大,被称为发达国家的经济血液.和平发展是当今世界的潮流,但在这个潮流背后,局部性冲突不断,特别发生于世界主要产油区中东地区的冲突经常引起世界原油价格激烈波动,今年以来中东地区以巴冲突加剧,世界原油价格上涨30%以上,前不久伊拉克宣布以停止出口原油为方式支持巴勒斯坦,并要求阿拉伯国家予以响应,虽然阿拉伯事件没人理会伊拉克,但世界原油价格维护于今年以来的高位仍然没变.     

Consumerism's sea change: how it will affect your company in the coming years

Consumerism and care management are the cost-containment strategies most employers say they will focus on over the next five years. This article reviews the growth of these strategies and the different ways employers have implemented them. The author then delineates the ten key ways that consumerism may affect companies over the next five- to ten-year time period, as these strategies continue to move health benefits toward greater transparency, flexibility and accountability.     

Choosing how to pay: The influence of foreign backgrounds

Is having a foreign background a relevant factor in choosing between payment instruments in consumer point-of-sale transactions after migration? We analyze this question using a unique diary survey in which both participants with a Dutch and a foreign background documented their daily purchases. We present several pieces of evidence suggesting that foreign backgrounds still influence the choice between payment instruments after migration to the Netherlands. For instance, we find that first-generation migrants from a number of countries that can be seen as cash-oriented are more likely to use cash in the Netherlands. At the same time, second-generation migrants have similar payment habits as individuals with a Dutch background. This finding suggests that payment behavior is not passed on between generations, but affected by host country payment habits. Finally, we suggest that, in this context, special information campaigns to increase debit card usage will not have clear net social benefits.     

The risk organisation: or how organisations reconcile themselves to failure

Over the last decade, the ideas, concepts and tools of risk management have colonised the way that organisations frame potential adverse outcomes associated with their activities. Intended as a means of optimising the tolerance, rather than elimination, of adverse organisational outcomes, risk management has been promoted as a means of challenging organisational practice, particularly in the context of heightened accountability pressures that can readily make organisations risk averse. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the extent to which risk ideas are able to challenge traditional organisational ways of understanding and responding to adverse outcomes. In this article, therefore, we examine the implementation of risk management practices in two contrasting organisational contexts; the UK Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the English university sector. Our studies suggest that risk management processes can be readily filtered and reinterpreted through a series of ideological, methodological and organisational mechanisms to reflect and reinforce organisational understandings and practices. We build on this analysis to point to what might tentatively be termed ‘Risk Organizations’, which are distinctive, at least in principle, by the way in which they seek to identify, but also come to terms with, failure. As such, rather than providing a means of organisational challenge, the systematic application of risk management practices tends to act as a conservative force of organisational continuity.     

Forming priors for DSGE models (and how it affects the assessment of nominal rigidities)

We discuss prior elicitation for the parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, and provide a method for constructing prior distributions for a subset of these parameters from beliefs about steady-state relationships and second moments of the endogenous variables. The empirical application documents how the specification of the prior distribution affects our assessment of the relative importance of price and wage rigidities in a New Keynesian DSGE model.     

Bank capital in the crisis: It's not just how much you have but who provides it

Bank capital is the cornerstone of bank regulation and is considered a key determinant of a bank's ability to withstand economic shocks. In the area of bank capital regulation, the general view is that more bank capital is better, irrespective of who provides it. In this paper, we investigate whether the investment horizon of bank capital providers matters for bank performance during the recent financial crisis. We observe that banks with more short-term investor ownership have worse stock returns during the crisis. Further exploration suggests that this is partially because banks with higher short-term investor ownership took more risk prior to the crisis but mainly because they experienced higher selling pressure during the crisis. Our results confirm the economic benefit of bank capital in helping banks to perform better during crises. However, when we decompose bank capital by the nature of its providers, we show that more capital is associated with worse performance when it is provided by short-term institutional investors.     

论我国的资本外逃问题及对策

日益严重的资本外逃问题已在很大的程度上影响了我国经济的健康发展，从资产组合理论和角度看，追逐利益，避免风险是中国资本外逃问题的成因，资本外逃削弱了中国国内建设的物质基础，影响了中国观经济的稳定，严重的资本外逃还会引发金融危机，降低国家的信用等级。防范和控制资本外逃问题应在法律上明确对私营企业的产权保护，加强反腐力度，加大对走私贩私等速法行为的打击。同时应加强和完善对金融资本账户的管制，创造稳定的宏观经济环境，建立统一高效的金融市场。     

What it means to work here

What distinguishes a company that has deeply engaged and committed employees from another one that doesn't? It's not a certain compensation scheme or talent-management practice. Instead, it's the ability to express to current and potential employees what makes the organization unique. Companies with highly engaged employees articulate their values and attributes through "signature experiences"--visible, distinctive elements of the work environment that send powerful messages about the organization's aspirations and about the skills, stamina, and commitment employees will need in order to succeed there. Whole Foods Market, for example, uses a team-based hiring and orientation process to convey to new employees the company's emphasis on collaboration and decentralization. At JetBlue, the reservation system is run by agents from their homes, a signature experience that boosts employees' satisfaction and productivity. Companies that successfully create and communicate signature experiences understand that not all workers want the same things. Indeed, employee preferences are an important but often overlooked factor in the war for talent. Firms that have engendered productive and engaged workforces address those preferences by following some general principles: They target potential employees as methodically as they target potential customers; they shape their signature experiences to address business needs; they identify and preserve their histories; they share stories--not just slogans--about life in the firm; they create processes consistent with their signature experiences; and they understand that they shouldn't try to be all things to all people. The best strategy for coming out ahead in the war for talent is not to scoop up everyone in sight but to attract the right people--those who are intrigued and excited by the environment the company offers and who will reward it with their loyalty.     

神雾集团如何做大赚钱的学问

在坐落于北京中关村科技园区昌平园的神雾集团大楼内,《国际融资》记者独家专访了北京神雾环境能源科技集团股份有限公司(简称:神雾集团)董事长兼总经理吴道洪博士。吴博士独特的创业经历与睿智的战略手笔,让我们看到了一家中国民营企业18年来是怎样从一家小微公司,发展成集"节能技术的研发-制造-设备配套-咨询与设计-工程总承包"全产业链布局,拥有石油化工甲级设计、咨询和工程总承包资质,冶金甲级设计、咨询和工程总承包资质,北京市唯一炉窑工程专业承包一级资质等工程资质,节能核心设备制造基地,全球最大的节能与低碳技术联合实验室等七家全资或控股子公司的股份制集团公司;又是怎样从最初销售工业炉喷嘴节能技术产品,创新研发出适用中国劣质黑色金属矿、劣质有色金属矿和冶金固废处理的高效清洁冶炼新技术和新工艺,并使多项核心技术走在了世界前列