Recent advances in computer technology have facilitated the development of computerised clinical information systems (CIS) to answer growing demands for accountability and quality assurance in the fields of mental health, social welfare and education. These systems aid and support ongoing monitoring and evaluation of professional practice. Although agencies invest considerable resources in comp...

Nabil R. Adam, Vijayalakshmi Atluri and Soon Ae Chun CIMIC, Rutgers University, Newark NJ 07102 {adam,atluri,soon}@cimic.rutgers.edu 1 Project Summary This NSF-funded project is a collaborative effort with the State of New Jersey to address two major problems in consuming and providing government services: the integration and customization of services. The government services needed by the citi...

Contemporary ecological models of health prominently feature the natural environment as fundamental to the ecosystem services that support human life, health, and well-being. The natural environment encompasses and permeates all other spheres of influence on health. Reviews of the natural environment and health literature have tended, at times intentionally, to focus on a limited subset of ecos...

It is generally believed that the existing human services structure is most accurately described as an array of potentially related programs that deliver distinct benefits or services to narrowly defined target populations. Each program can be thought of as representing a service silo: a separate and distinct funnel through which money, regulations, and professional norms, and expectations flow...

Restraints and seclusion are used on people in institutions, children in schools, nursing home residents, general hospital patients, and other locations, but most often with people who have disabilities. Questions regarding legality, morality, and efficacy abound. These questions, compounded by the serious possible adverse consequences of restraints and seclusion, have commanded wide-ranging at...

Belief in the resource-saving and service-enhancing potential of inter-organizational collaboration has become virtually an article of faith among resource providers, client advocates, and service planners. Yet collaboration in practice encounters myriad difficulties, and successful collaborations seem to be relatively rare. In this paper, we focus on providers’ incentives to collaborate: why m...

responding to critical shortages of physicians, most sub-saharan countries have scaled up training of nonphysician clinicians (npcs), resulting in a gradual but decisive shift to npcs as the cornerstone of healthcare delivery. this development should unfold in parallel with strategic rethinking about the role of physicians and with innovations in physician education and in-service training. in ...

As personalisation is becoming prevalent in many areas, there is an increasing desire to provide personalised services (e.g., personalised brochures) in the government domain. The idea behind these services is that they would be fully automated, but feel personalised to the users. We argue in this paper that, sometimes, and in particular for some groups of citizens, the ―human touch‖ is importa...