We analyzed the effect of the level of low asset specificity IT outsourcing on firm-level financial performance. We used transaction cost economics (TCE) as the theoretical basis to explain the effect of the level of network and telecommunication services outsourced on financial performance. An analysis of 1444 Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems revealed that higher levels of network and te...

This paper details the treatment of performance data in outsourced call centre operations, as encountered by a team of researchers throughout the course of a project. This project aimed at improving support for performance and motivation management in an outsourced customer care contact centre for a large telecommunications company. In particular, we focus on how the practices of capturing, agg...

Cloud computing is a new delivery model for information technology services and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources over the Internet. However, cloud computing raises concerns on how cloud service providers, user organizations, and governments should handle such information and interactions. Personal health records represent an emerging pa...

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic primitive which significantly enhances the versatility of access control mechanisms. Due to the high expressiveness of ABE policies, the computational complexities of ABE key-issuing (by Attribute Authorities (AAs)) and decryption (by eligible users) are getting prohibitively high. Despite that the existing Outsourced ABE solutions a...

Due to the concern on cloud security, digital encryption is applied before outsourcing data for utilization. This introduces a challenge about how efficiently perform queries over ciphertexts. Crypto-based solutions currently suffer from limited operation support, high computational complexity, weak generality, and poor verifiability. An alternative method that utilizes hardware-assisted Truste...

BACKGROUND Demand for dialysis treatment exceeds its supply within the Veterans Health Administration (VA), requiring VA to outsource dialysis care by purchasing private sector dialysis for veterans on a fee-for-service basis. It is unclear whether outcomes are similar for veterans receiving dialysis from VA versus non-VA providers. We assessed the extent of chronic dialysis treatment utilizati...