Fledgling firms offer hope on health costs

Julia Adler-Milstein and Ashish Jha Regional health information organizations--RHIOs--are springing up in the United States to meet a vital need: to connect the nation's disparate patient-health information systems. If RHIOs can find a viable business model, they stand to improve the quality and decrease the cost of U.S. health care dramatically.     

More preventive care, and fewer emergency room visits and prescription drugs--health care utilization in a consumer-driven health plan

Although consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs) have grown dramatically, the question of whether CDHPs have reduced health care costs has not been answered definitively. This article presents what the authors believe to be the first study to analyze a large sample of claims data and to look in detail at different types of utilization among enrollees in a CDHP and those in a traditional comprehensive major medical (CMM) plan. After adjusting for the finding that CDHP enrollees are both younger and healthier than those in CMM plans, the authors found that CDHP enrollees show no consistent or significant utilization differences for measures over which consumers have little control (e.g., inpatient stays); lower utilization for measures over which consumers have greater control (e.g., emergency room visits); and higher utilization of preventive services.     

克服流程改进“7宗罪”

任何行业任何规模的公司都已渐渐明白他们需要改进业务流程,包括产品开发、订单履行、计划、分销、账务处理、招聘、客服等流程。每个人都在做着——或至少是在谈论如何做——“流程改进”、“流程再设计”、或“流程再造”。如同采用其它的绩效改进努力一样,多数的组织都明确表达了对流程改进所期待的成果：节约成本、质量改进、压缩周期时间。     

Stop holding yourself back

After working with hundreds of leaders in a wide variety of organizations and in countries all over the globe, the authors found one very clear pattern: When it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way. Five barriers in particular tend to keep promising managers from becoming exceptional leaders: People overemphasize personal goals, protect their public image, turn their competitors into two-dimensional enemies, go it alone instead of soliciting support and advice, and wait for permission to lead. Troy, a customer service manager, endangered his job and his company's reputation by focusing on protecting his position, not helping his team; when a trusted friend advised him to change his behavior, the results were striking. Anita's insistence on sticking to the tough personal she'd created for herself caused her to ignore the more intuitive part of the leadership equation, with disastrous results--until she let go of the need to appear invulnerable and reached out to another manager. Jon, a personal trainer who had virtually no experience with either youth development programs or urban life, opened a highly successful gym for inner-city kids at risk; he refused to be daunted by his lack of expertise and decided to simply "go for it." As these and other examples from the authors' research demonstrate, being a leader means making an active decision to lead. Only then will the workforce--and society--benefit from the enormous amount of talent currently sitting on the bench.     

投资全球连通

更多的全球连通能够带来什么机遇并不明朗，但我们应该在特定机会降临之前，事先建立起互连互通的关系     

存储与带宽将成为网络的核心

Internet风暴把全世界都卷入了信息时代的变革之中。它带来的全新Internet经济、竞争和生产效率模式,已经深入到世界的每一个角落,触及了企业的每一根神经。近几年来,网络公司如雨后春笋般地涌现,政府、企业上网工程正快速发展,电子商务日益火爆。这就必然导致网上信息的急剧增长。美国加州伯克利大学作过的一个调查显示,从人类有史以来到现在整体信息数据量大概是120亿GB。据预测,今后两年内人类社会增长的信息量将超过这个数字。可见,无论对于中国还是世界来说,信息对于将来的成功都是至关重要的。随着Internet技术与应用的进一步发展,越来越多的企业已经不再满足于普通电子邮件或