Using social media in hotel crisis management: the case of bed bugs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bingjie Liu et al: “This study extends the tourism crisis management model to include social media, concerning the role of monitoring and responding. With a specific focus on the hotel industry, this study aims to provide greater insights into the state of the art in crisis management and aid in better response to health related crises.

Findings

This paper discusses the use of social media at different phases of managing a bed bug crisis, which include risk reduction, readiness, response, and recovery. Recommendations are also provided for hotel managers to combat health related crises that are fought out on social media.

Social media has helped to bridge the communication gap between customers and hotels. Bed bug infestations are a growing health crisis and have obtained increasing attention on social media sites. Without managing this crisis effectively, bed bug infestation can cause economic loss and reputational damages to hotel properties, ranging from negative comments and complaints, to possible law suits. Thus, it is essential for hoteliers to understand the importance of social media in crisis communication, and to incorporate social media in hotels’ crisis management plans.

This study serves as one of the first attempts in the hospitality field to offer discussions and recommendations on how hotels can manage the bed bug crisis and other crises of this kind by incorporating social media into their crisis management practices….(More)”

Helping the public sector get innovative while saving money

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “Innovation procurement is a public procurement practice according to which public authorities request businesses to develop or buy innovative products or services that fit these organisations’ specific needs. For example, it could help hospitals use e-health tools allowing doctors to monitor their patients’ condition from a distance; it could allow local authorities to improve traffic management in their region, hence reducing congestion and pollution, improving road safety and using the road network effectively; it could also help cities better manage street lighting to make roads safer and more attractive, while increasing energy efficiency; it could help public administration improve efficiency through the use of cloud solutions. Public Procurement in Europe represents a 19% of GDP in Europe -or around € 2,400 billion a year. Innovation procurement also helps boost smaller, more innovative companies, as it means using public procurement funds to buy products or services also from smaller suppliers who are trying to find new ways of dealing with specific needs.

The European Assistance for Innovation Procurement (EAFIP) initiative will help those in charge of public procurement design and implement processes to access such services.

More specifically:

  • it will provide them with a toolkit to help in the procedure;
  • It will offer training: 9 workshops, each dedicated to a different subject area such as health or transport will be organised across Europe, providing participants with good practice approaches and hands-on support. Events will be announced on this page;
  • It will raise awareness around public procurement of ICT solutions through 3 EU-wide events, where new ideas and initiatives for EU-wide cooperation on public procurement will be discussed….(More)

Creating Health in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Leigh Carroll & Bridget B. Kelly at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “This series has explored what it means to create health, sketching a collective path to new systems that can contribute to health in the 21st century. The overarching message is that we in the health sector need to take community—people’s connections to each other and their places, and everything that arises from these connections—more seriously, and that all types of professionals can do this, whether in hospitals or philanthropies or grocery stores.

If we really take community and connectedness seriously, we will be vigilant about the extent to which we strengthen or disrupt it when developing health interventions. We will value the knowledge and assets that all people have to offer from their unique relationships with people and place. And ultimately, we will commit to building the power that communities have to create health themselves, beyond clinical services and public health interventions.

Unfortunately, the systems we have created, rather than the solutions we now need, often drive current approaches to improving health. We have garnered from contributors to the series a number of principles to guide us as we develop new ways of doing things, as well as concrete steps toward contributing to a culture that values connections and relationships as much as treatments and health campaigns.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

  1. Acknowledge that our success depends on each other. Creating health will happen among individuals and institutions, so we must set aside ego, trust others, and recognize that our individual knowledge is limited and our progress is collective.
  2. Bring more voices to the table. It is vital to understand the dynamics and relationships within a given community. To do that, we must ensure that all who may be affected by and involved in carrying out an intervention have the opportunity to comfortably share their visions and concerns.
  3. Expand what counts as knowledge. The insights that communities share often play second fiddle to what professionals and academics typically deem valuable. Putting them on a more equal footing influences what to implement, how to allocate resources, and conclusions about whether something “worked.”
  4. Embrace emergence, including unpredictability. We must abandon the linear approach favored by traditional health care and embrace the unpredictable nature of community-driven interventions. We must learn and adapt in real time, and remember that unexpected outcomes are one way an intervention can succeed.
  5. Value what people value. All too often we decide what to aim for and evaluate based on what we can easily measure. It is essential to flip this—to identify goals and then figure out ways of measuring progress toward them. …(More)

Government at a Glance 2015

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report and dataset by the OECD: “Government at a Glance provides readers with a dashboard of key indicators assembled with the goal of contributing to the analysis and international comparison of public sector performance. Indicators on government revenues, expenditures, and employment are provided alongside key output and outcome data in the sectors of education, health and justice. Government at a Glance also includes indicators on key governance and public management issues, such as transparency in governance, regulatory governance, public procurement and the implementation of employment and remuneration reforms since 2008. While measuring government performance has long been recognized as playing an important role in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public administration, following the economic crisis and fiscal tightening in many member countries, good indicators are needed more than ever to help governments make informed decisions regarding tough choices and help restore confidence in government institutions… (More)”

The science prize that’s making waves

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “The Ocean Health XPrize reveals a new fashion among philanthropists’…There is another reason why the Ocean Health XPrize fascinates me: what it reveals about the new fashion among philanthropists for handing out big scientific prizes. The idea is not a new one: wealthy people and governments have been giving prizes for centuries. In 1714, for example, the British government passed the Longitude Act, establishing a board to offer reward money for innovation in navigation — the most money was won by John Harrison, a clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer.

But a fascinating shift has taken place in the prize-giving game. In previous decades, governments or philanthropists usually bestowed money to recognise past achievements, often in relation to the arts. In 2012, McKinsey, the management consultants, estimated that before 1991, 97 per cent of prize money was a “recognition” award — for example, the Nobel Prizes. Today, however, four-fifths of all prize money is “incentive” or “inducement” awards. This is because many philanthropists and government agencies have started staging competitions to spur innovation in different fields, particularly science.

The best known of these is the XPrize Foundation, initiated two decades ago by Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur. The original award, the Ansari XPrize, offered $10m to the first privately financed team to put a vehicle into space. Since then, the XPrize has spread its wings into numerous different fields, including education and life sciences. Indeed, having given $30m in prize money so far, it has another $70m of competitions running, including the Google Lunar XPrize, which is offering $30m to land a privately funded robot on the moon.

McKinsey estimates that if you look across the field of prize-giving around the world, “total funds available from large prizes have more than tripled over the last decade to reach $350m”, while the “total prize sector could already be worth as much as $1bn to $2bn”. The Ocean Health XPrize, in other words, is barely a drop in the prize-giving ocean.

Is this a good thing? Not always, it might seem. As the prizes proliferate, they can sometimes overlap. The money being awarded tends — inevitably — to reflect the pet obsessions of philanthropists, rather than what scientists themselves would like to explore. And even the people running the prizes admit that these only work when there is a clear problem to be solved….(More)”

Science to the people!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Magan, at Digital Agenda for Europe:” …I attended the 2nd Barcelona Citizen Science Day organised as part of the city’s Science Festival. The programme was full and varied and in itself a great example of the wonderful world of do-it-yourself, hands-on, accessible, practical science. A huge variety of projects (see below) was delivered with enthusiasm, passion, and energy!

The day was rounded off with a presentation by Public Lab who showed how a bit of technical ingenuity like cheap cameras on kites and balloons can be used to keep governments and large businesses more honest and accountable – for example, data they collected is being used in court cases against BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what was most striking is the empowerment that these Citizen Science projects give individuals to do things for themselves – to take measures to monitor, protect or improve their urban or rural environment; to indulge their curiosity or passions; to improve their finances; to work with others; to do good while having serious fun….If you want to have a deeper look, here are some of the many projects presented on a great variety of themes:

Water

Wildlife

Climate

Arts

Public health

Human

A nice booklet capturing them is available and there’s aslo a summary in Catalan only.

Read more about citizen science in the European Commission….(More)”

Modernizing Informed Consent: Expanding the Boundaries of Materiality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nadia N. Sawicki: “Informed consent law’s emphasis on the disclosure of purely medical information – such as diagnosis, prognosis, and the risks and benefits of various treatment alternatives – does not accurately reflect modern understandings of how patients make medical decisions. Existing common law disclosure duties fail to capture a variety of non-medical factors relevant to patients, including information about the physician’s personal characteristics; the cost of treatment; the social implications of various health care interventions; and the legal consequences associated with diagnosis and treatment. Although there is a wealth of literature analyzing the merits of such disclosures in a few narrow contexts, there is little broader discussion and no consensus about whether there the doctrine of informed consent should be expanded to include information that may be relevant to patients but falls outside the traditional scope of medical materiality. This article seeks to fill that gap.
I offer a normative argument for expanding the scope of informed consent disclosure to include non-medical information that is within the physician’s knowledge and expertise, where the information would be material to the reasonable patient and its disclosure does not violate public policy. This proposal would result in a set of disclosure requirements quite different from the ones set by modern common law and legislation. In many ways, the range of required disclosures may become broader, particularly with respect to physician-specific information about qualifications, health status, and financial conflicts of interests. However, some disclosures that are currently required by statute (or have been proposed by commentators) would fall outside the scope of informed consent – most notably, information about support resources available in the abortion context; about the social, ethical, and legal implications of treatment; and about health care costs….(More)”

This App Lets You See The Tough Choices Needed To Balance Your City’s Budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jay Cassano at FastCoExist: “Ask the average person on the street how much money their city spends on education or health care or police. Even the most well-informed probably won’t be able to come up with a dollar amount. That’s because even if you are interested, municipal budgets aren’t presented in a way that makes sense to ordinary people.

Balancing Act is a web app that displays a straightforward pie chart of a city’s budget, broken down into categories like pensions, parks & recreations, police, and education. But it doesn’t just display the current budget breakdown. It invites users to tweak it, expressing their own priorities, all while keeping the city in the black. Do you want your libraries to be better funded? Fine—but you’re going to have to raise property taxes to do it.

“Balancing Act provides a way for people to both understand what public entities are doing and then to weight that against the other possible things that government can do,” says Chris Adams, president of Engaged Public, a Colorado-based consulting firm that develops technology for government and non-profits. “Especially in this era of information, all of us have a responsibility to spend a bit of time understanding how our government is spending money on our behalf.”

Hartford, Connecticut is the first city in the country that is using Balancing Act. The city was facing a $49 million budget deficit this spring, and Mayor Pedro Segarra says he took input from citizens using Balancing Act. Meanwhile, in Engaged Public’s home state, residents can input their income to generate an itemized tax receipt and then tweak the Colorado state budget as they see fit.

Engaged Public hopes that by making budgets more interactive and accessible, more people will take an interest in them.

“Budget information almost universally exists, but it’s not in accessible formats—mostly they’re in PDF files,” says Adams. “So citizens are invited to pour through tens of thousands of pages of PDFs. But that really doesn’t give you a high-level understanding of what’s at stake in a reasonable amount of time.”

If widely used, Balancing Act could be a useful tool for politicians to check the pulse of their constituents. For example, decreasing funding to parks draws a negative public reaction. But if enough people on Balancing Act experimented with the budget, saw the necessity of it, and submitted their recommendations, then an elected might be willing to make a decision that would otherwise seem politically risky….(More)”

Harnessing the Crowd to Solve Healthcare

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PSFK Labs: “While being sick is never a good situation to be in, the majority of people can still take solace in the fact that modern medicine will be able to diagnose their problem and get them on the path to a quick recovery. For a small percentage of patients, however, simply finding out what ails them can be a challenge. Despite countless visits to specialists and mounting costs, these individuals can struggle for years to find out any reliable information about their illness.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that in a heavily regulated industry like healthcare, words like “personalization,” “transparency” and “collaboration” are near impossibilities, leaving these patients locked into a system that can’t care for them. Enter CrowdMed, an online platform that uses the combined knowledge of its community to overcome these obstacles, getting people the answers and treatment they need.

…we spoke with Jared Heyman, the company’s founder, to understand how the crowd can deliver unprecedented efficiencies to a system sorely in need of them…. “CrowdMed harnesses the wisdom of crowds to solve the world’s most difficult medical cases online. Let’s say that you’ve been bouncing doctor to doctor, but don’t yet have a definitive diagnosis or treatment plan. You can submit your case on our site by answering an in‑depth patient questionnaire, uploading relevant medical records, diagnostic test results or even medical images. We expose your case to our community of currently over 15,000 medical detectives. These are people mostly with medical backgrounds who enjoy solving these challenges.

We have about a 70 percent success rate, bringing patients closer to a direct diagnosis or cure and we do so in a very small fraction of the time and cost of what it would take through the traditional medical system….

Every entrepreneur builds upon the tools and technologies that preceded them. I think that CrowdMed needed the Internet. It needed Facebook. It needed Wikipedia. It needed Quora, and other companies or products that have proven that you can trust in the wisdom of the crowd. I think we’re built upon the shoulders of these other companies.

We looked at all these other companies that have proven the value of social networks through crowdsourcing, and that’s inspired us to do what we do. It’s been instructive for us in the best way to do it, and it’s also prepared society, psychologically and culturally, for what we’re doing. All these things were important….(More)”

Government data does not mean data governance: Lessons learned from a public sector application audit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nik Thompson, Ravi Ravindran, and Salvatore Nicosia: “Public sector agencies routinely store large volumes of information about individuals in the community. The storage and analysis of this information benefits society, as it enables relevant agencies to make better informed decisions and to address the individual’s needs more appropriately. Members of the public often assume that the authorities are well equipped to handle personal data; however, due to implementation errors and lack of data governance, this is not always the case. This paper reports on an audit conducted in Western Australia, focusing on findings in the Police Firearms Management System and the Department of Health Information System. In the case of the Police, the audit revealed numerous data protection issues leading the auditors to report that they had no confidence in the accuracy of information on the number of people licensed to possess firearms or the number of licensed firearms. Similarly alarming conclusions were drawn in the Department of Health as auditors found that they could not determine which medical staff member was responsible for clinical data entries made. The paper describes how these issues often do not arise from existing business rules or the technology itself, but a lack of sound data governance. Finally, a discussion section presents key data governance principles and best practices that may guide practitioners involved in data management. These cases highlight the very real data management concerns, and the associated recommendations provide the context to spark further interest in the applied aspects of data protection….(More)”