In today’s healthcare environment, where financial realities play an important role in business decision making, it is vital that managers at all levels under- stand the basic concepts of healthcare finance and how these concepts are used to enhance the financial well-being of the organization. In this chapter, we introduce readers to the book, including its goals and organization. Fur- th…
Today, more than at any previous time, the success of an organization depends on its ability to acquire accurate and timely data about its operations, to manage this data effectively, and to use it to analyze and guide its activities. Phrases such as the information superhighway have become ubiquitous, and information processing is a rapidly growing multibillion dollar industry. The amount …
The quality of health care received by the people of the United States falls far short of what it should be (Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry, 1998; Chassin and Galvin, 1998). A large body of literature documents serious quality problems. There is a gap (some say a “chasm”) between the health care services that should be provided based on cu…
Packet retransmission is a fundamental TCP mechanism that ensures reliable data transfer between two end nodes. Interestingly, when it comes to cellular data accounting, TCP retransmissins create an important policy issue giving rise to a tension between ISPs accounting for network resource consumption, and users only being aware of the application layer data. Regardless of the policies, we fi…
There is hardly any field of educational action where the notion of network(ing) has not been postulated as a guid- ing principle and a key competence of practitioners at all levels of the hierarchy. Networks and networking are gen- erally considered to have high potential for solving struc- tural problems in education. In the publication The Art of Networking a particular type of educational …
This book is written for the first and second levels of undergraduate degree study in accounting and business studies, or equivalent introductory accounting courses where an understanding of accounting is a basic requirement. It is based on the author’s experience in providing a first level management accounting text and takes account of helpful suggestions from reviewers of three successiv…
E. Wayne Nafziger analyzes the economic development of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and East-Central Europe. This book is suitable for those with a background in economics principles. Nafziger explains the reasons for the recent fast growth of India, Poland, Brazil, China, and other Pacific Rim countries and the slow, yet essential, growth for a turnaround of sub-Saharan Africa. The fifth …
The National Cancer Policy Board (board) concluded in its April 1999 re- port, Ensuring Quality Cancer Care, that based on the best available evidence, some individuals with cancer do not receive care known to be effective for their condition. The magnitude of the problem is not known, but the board believes it is substantial (IOM 1999a). Why do we know so little about the nature and extent of …
The classical view of inventory data collection is that of employees filling out forms of various kinds throughout the warehouse and production areas, which are then forwarded to a central data entry location, where hordes of clerks keypunch the data into a central computer database. Although this was a reasonably accurate view of the situation in the past, the types of systems available for co…
We begin this chapter by outlining the problems that stakeholder theory was originally conceptualized to solve and the “basic mechanics” that we believe underlie the development of the theory during the last thirty years. We turn in the next sections to the arguments of Milton Friedman, Michael Jensen, Michael Porter, and Oliver Williamson, often cited as opponents of stakeholder theor…
Financial accounting is the communication of information about a business or other type of organization (such as a charity or government) so that individuals can assess its financial health and prospects. Probably no single word is more relevant to financial accounting than “information.” Whether it is gathering financial information about a specific organization, putting that information…
This is a guide to designing and programming embedded systems to communicate in local Ethernet networks and on the Internet.