C4I Roadmap March 2005

Patients expect to be safe from harm inside the walls of a hospital. Increasing reports of medical errors and adverse events have brought these concerns to public attention. Although we have celebrated many scientific advances over the past several decades, many patients do not benefit because the healthcare infrastructure is inadequate to deliver care to all. Studies confirm opportunities to improve in areas such as inpatient vaccination for flu and outpatient screening for breast, cervical or colon cancer. (Institute of Medicine, (IOM), 2000, 2001, 2004). This document outlines the steps needed to further increase our focus on patient safety in John Dempsey Hospital through the development of a multi-disciplinary Collaborative Center for Clinical Care Improvement (CCCCI). The dimensions of safety and outcomes are briefly discussed to provide some perspective on the scope of these challenges (Strongwater, 2003).

Conversations between Anthropologists and Economists

Interdisciplinary citation patterns and other indicators of the flow and sharing of academic knowledge suggest that economists and anthropologists do not talk to each other. Previous studies of this puzzling trend have typically attributed the problem to methodological differences between the two disciplines. Although there are significant differences between economics and anthropology in behavioral assumptions and modes of inquiry, similar differences exist between them and other disciplines (some with much heavier volumes of cross-citations with economics or anthropology), suggesting that the source of the problem lies elsewhere. This paper considers the problem at a deeper level by examining systematic differences in the preferences, capabilities, and literary cultures of economists and anthropologists. Adopting a rhetorical perspective, I consider not the firms, households, or tribes as the principal objective of analysis in the two disciplines, but the conversations between these units. These conversations (through non-verbal as well as verbal media) can be grouped into two genres, based on the type of problem they aim to solve. Those in the first genre aim to solve the problem of interest--how to align the incentives of the parties involved. Those in the second genre deal with the problem of knowledge--how to align localized, and dispersed information. Economists are interested and capable of dealing with primarily, if not exclusively, the first genre, and anthropologists focus on the second. This difference has far reaching consequences for how economists and anthropologists conduct their own scholarly conversations with their own colleagues, why they are having difficulty talking to each other across disciplinary boundaries, and what can be done to change the patterns of communication.

Property Condition Disclosure Law: Why Did States Mandate 'Seller Tell All'?

Thirty-six US states have already enacted some form of seller's property condition disclosure law. At a time when there is a movement in this direction nationally, this paper attempts to ascertain the factors that lead states to adopt disclosure law. Motivation for the study stems from the fact that not all states have yet adopted the law, and states that have enacted the law have done so in different years. The analytical structure employs hazard models, using a unique set of economic and institutional attributes for a panel of 50 US States spanning 21 years, from 1984 to 2004. The proportional hazard analysis of law adoption reveals that greater number of disciplinary actions tends to favor passage of the law. Greater broker supervision, implying generally higher awareness among real estate agents, seems to have a negative impact on the likelihood of a state adopting a property condition disclosure law.