Jonathan Patrick Awarded Grant from NSERC
Jonathan Patrick, a Telfer School professor who uses advanced modelling techniques to solve large-scale sequential decision problems in healthcare, has just been awarded a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). His ground-breaking research is focused on capacity planning within a network of community services, with the goal of ensuring timely discharges through the acute care setting as well as scheduling models for entry into health systems.
Context:
It has generally been necessary to compartmentalize the health system in order to simplify management challenges into a workable model. This approach fails to take into account the significant complexity involved in patient flow through the hospital environment and the highly dependent nature of the decisions being optimized. The success of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) means that some of that compartmentalization is no longer necessary.
Professor Patrick and his team will build a Markov Decision Process (MDP) models that combine the advanced scheduling and appointment scheduling problems into one model capable of handling multiple resources consumed in sequence. It will be assessed in light of predictions about congestion within a hospital. In the final stage of the work, a capacity planning model for community care services will be designed to maintain proper flow out of acute care.
Professor Lysanne Lessard Awarded Grant from NSERC
Professor Lysanne Lessard was awarded a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for innovative research in the field of knowledge-intensive service systems.
Knowledge-intensive service activities are key components of industrialized economies, with this sector alone contributing over $80 billion to Canada’s Gross Domestic Product in 2012. A knowledge-intensive service system (KISS) is a network of organizational and technological agents that rely on knowledge as a key resource to collaboratively create knowledge-intensive outputs and outcomes that are valuable to the system’s entities. Examples include networks that form around knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) providers and open innovation initiatives.
The field currently lacks architectural frameworks that account for key characteristics of knowledge-intensive service systems (KISS) such as collaborative relationships among entities and their reliance on knowledge. Professor Lessard aims at addressing this gap by creating an Intentional Architectural Framework for the development of KISS Architectures (IAF-KISSA). This work will provide, among other applications, a formal approach for aligning functional aspects of KISS, such as resource planning, with business aspects, such as performance evaluation.
Professor Doloreux's Research is at the Heart of Innovation
Innovation captures the public’s interest because it can be such an elusive goal. Researchers in academe and in the public and private sectors are working to discover how, where and why innovation occurs.
To foster innovation in business, decision-makers often point to a region where it flourishes and then apply the region’s seemingly beneficial features elsewhere. Is this the right approach?
Not necessarily, says David Doloreux, who holds a Research Chair in Canadian Francophonie at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management.
Telfer Annual Accounting and Finance Conference a Resounding Success
The first Telfer Annual Accounting and Finance Conference was a notable success. More than 40 researchers from the Telfer School, Carleton University, Queen’s University, Université du Québec en Outaouais, and the Bank of Canada attended the event, hosted on May 15 in the Desmarais Building.
The conference’s inaugural program featured 16 presentations, including two keynote speakers. Kose John, Charles William Gerstenberg Professor of Banking and Finance, New York University, explored the interaction between risk and corporate governance and the impact of the financial crisis on innovation, risk and optimal regulation. Daniel Thornton, Chartered Professional Accountants of Ontario Professor, Queen’s University, examined Canada’s IFRS transition in terms of different conceptual frameworks for public and private enterprises.
This event was supported by the Research Office of the Telfer School, the Father Edgar Thivierge Chair in Business History and the CPA Canada Accounting and Governance Research Centre.
The lead organizers were Professor Samir Saadi (finance) and Professor Lamia Chourou (accounting).
A Closer Look at ‘Common Ground’ for Collaborative Health Delivery
An elusive but essential ingredient for success in collaborative health activities is establishing “common ground” among a diversity of individual and group actors. Existing research on common ground (CG) has for the most part focused on it as a one-time event, neglecting the multiple activities needed to develop CG over time.
Professor Craig Kuziemsky of the Telfer School and Professor Tracey O’Sullivan of the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences are of the view that CG in collaboration has to be seen as more than just a conversation, shared information or a shared model. Their study in the March issue of Social Science and Medicine presents CG as a dynamic process that in the authors’ words “drives collaboration in health communities in order to generate actions and solutions to problems.”
“There is a strong need, as our study and others have highlighted, for people to build enough shared knowledge to communicate, coordinate, and collabore as part of group activities,” explained professor Kuziemsky, Director of the M.Sc. in Health Systems Program at the Telfer School. One of the key issues with CG: its many components do not evolve in sync. Loss of face to face interaction can make developing collaboration a challenge. Collaboration has to start with a basic foundation, “People need to become comfortable with one another through engagement and awareness about people, processes and resources.”
Professors Kuziemsky and O’Sullivan studied CG development in three Canadian communities in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Alberta between October 2010 and March 2011 through a project on capacity building for disaster management. It involved focus group discussions with participants from multiple sectors, including emergency management professionals, firefighters, police, paramedics, social work and community liaisons and other essential services. The study identified three distinct stages of CG focused on establishing the governance structure for conversation, networking and exchange (coordinative stage); elaboration of rules and protocols (cooperative stage); and finally use of those protocols in problem solving (collaborative stage).
It is the first study that has looked extensively at the relationship between micro (individual) and macro (group) CG development. Understanding what motivates individuals to collaborate and what they need to acquire from collaboration is necessary to form CG at a group level, explained Kuziemsky. While CG is a group activity, a group is the sum of several unique individuals. An individual's desire to maintain autonomy and not share information and resources is a barrier to developing CG at the group level. “CG development is very much a negotiation between individual and group needs.”
By identifying specific categories of individual and group CG development, the research provides a way of targeting collaborative outcomes. This perspective is similar to the concept of social learning that looks at the differences between individual and group learning and how to design instructional artifacts (e.g. information resources, learning tools) to integrate the two learning types, noted Kuziemsky. “Indeed, future work could incorporate theories from social learning, and other domains, to expand the individual-group aspect of our research.”
Crucial implications for leadership also emerged from the work. The findings highlight that leadership is more than just directing people; it also involves maintaining sustainability by keeping people together and engaged during the “peaks and troughs” of common ground development.
