Obama's law : analysis of a breakthrough law on healthcare access and lessons for the Portuguese health system management

ABSTRACT - The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shook the foundations of the US health system, offering all Americans access to health care by changing the way the health insurance industry works. As President Obama signed the Act on 23 March 2010, he said that it stood for “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care”. Unlike the U.S., the Article 64 of the Portuguese Constitution provides, since 1976, the right to universal access to health care. However, facing a severe economic crisis, Portugal has, under the supervision of the Troika, a tight schedule to implement measures to improve the efficiency of the National Health Service. Both countries are therefore despite their different situation, in a conjuncture of reform and the use of new health management measures. The present work, using a qualitative research methodology examines the Affordable Care Act in order to describe its principles and enforcement mechanisms. In order to describe the reality in Portugal, the Portuguese health system and the measures imposed by Troika are also analyzed. The intention of this entire analysis is not only to disclose the innovative U.S. law, but to find some innovative measures that could serve health management in Portugal. Essentially we identified the Exchanges and Wellness Programs, described throughout this work, leaving also the idea of the possibility of using them in the Portuguese national health system.

Internationalization process: GuestCentric Systems Embracing People‟s Republic of China

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Couch & Brunch: The breakfast chain business model

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Plux: Designing a solution for growth in the sports sector

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The international expansion strategy of Striyah in Poland

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

While the crisis proceeds: A world redistribution of economic power?

The crisis has drawn attention to the fact that not only emerging powers but other regions of the world as well may be offering different development models and may constitute into alternative, in some dimensions more positive agents, in the conduct of the present stage of globalisation. Notwithstanding, the traditional western powers have not lost a large amount of control of the world economy. And the crisis proceeds, reallocating world power as in a Hobbesian anarchy. It is difficult to foresee smooth developments in the near future. On the contrary, multilateralism seems to be losing ground to unilateral action or bilateral arrangements. More or less disguised currency wars may lead to serious disequilibria, and turf wars may become more frequent, with motives ranging from securing captive markets to control of specific commodities and energy goods, or targeted regulatory frameworks. As economic policy becomes even more involved with defence and security affairs, the feedbacks from each side to the other seem likely to keep dissent and animosity high, rather than contributing to peaceful and constructive approaches. A more trouble-prone world may be easily expected.

The Nova SBE University merchandising venture

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Dual track sell-out: Signaling through IPO and Underpricing

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Finance from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Opening Pousada da Serra da Estrela in Covilhã: A two-way impact analysis - interacting with private agents

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Some Preliminaries in Approaching Carlos Seixas’ Keyboard Sonatas

The figure and the oeuvre of Carlos Seixas (1704-42) were rediscovered in the 1930s chiefly by the British musicologist Macario Santiago Kastner (1908-92), whose writings and editions raised the attention of international scholars and interpreters for the Portuguese composer. Nevertheless, and in spite of an unusual editorial tradition for Portuguese standards, a critical appraisal of the body of sources of Seixas' keyboard sonatas has never been attempted, to the point of even impeding the knowledge of how many there really are. This article deals briefly with the issues of source situation, authorship attribution and the distinctive characteristics of Seixas' style, offering a preliminary catalogue of the sonatas and a description of four of the manuscript collections containing them, housed at the National Library of Portugal. Textual peculiarities and problems of works surviving in more than one source are examined and the question of text 'banalization' by means of the incorporation of performance practice gestures is also discussed, advancing the hypothesis of the existence of two different traditions for some of the sonatas―one written and one 'oral'―that merge in the texts known to us.

Differences in ERP use and value across Iberian Manufacturing and Services SMEs

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system literature reports very little research on post-adoption stages, that is, actual usage and value. Even fewer studies focus on the specificities of an industry analysis. Based on the Technology-Organizational-Environment (TOE) framework and the Resource-Based View (RBV) theory, we develop a research model to measure and examine determinants of ERP use and value and their impact in the Iberian region (Portugal and Spain) across Manufacturing and Services industries in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The empirical test was conducted through structural equation modelling, using data from 261 firms in the peninsula in the Manufacturing and Service industries. Results show that amongst ERP use determinants, Training is the most important determinant for Service firms and Compatibility for Manufacturing firms. Firm size, Analytics, and Collaboration contribute to ERP Value in both industries, with Analytics being more important for the Service industry. The paper provides insight into which determinants contribute to ERP use and ERP value in Iberian Manufacturing and Services SMEs, offering managerial and academic implications.

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.

Internationalization of UniPlaces to the Spanish market: Internationalization plan to Madrid, Spain

Field Lab in Entrepreneurial Innovative Ventures

Attitudes and behaviors of Croation consumers towards wine purchasing

This paper focuses on the importance of consumers’ habits, preferences and needs in the Croatian wine market to have a better understanding of consumer purchase and consumption behavior. Survey was conducted on Croatian consumers to identify purchasing variables and explain consumer attitudes and behaviors. Along with the online survey, results were also provided using additional journals and research examples. Both measures offered a better understanding of the issues mentioned. Additionally, both may be used in order to implement effective marketing strategies. The results are essential for the preservation of Croatian wine and purchase growth, but also consumption. Moreover, they offer foundations on which to improve Croatian wine offering.