Introduction: Self-management is considered a potential answer to the increasing demand for family medicine by people suffering from a chronic condition or multi-morbidity. A key element of self-management is goal setting. Goal setting is often defined as a moment of agreement between a professional and a patient. In the self-management literature, however, goal setting is regarded as a circular process. Still, it is unclear how professionals working in family medicine can put it into practice. This background paper aims to contribute to the understanding of goal setting within self-management and to identify elements that need further development for practical use. Debate: Four questions for debate emerge in this article: (1) What are self-management goals? (2) What is necessary to accomplish the process of goal setting within self-management? (3) How can professionals decide on the degree of support needed for goal setting within self-management? (4) How can patients set their goals and how can they be supported? Implications: Self-management goals can be set for different (life) domains. Using a holistic framework will help in creating an overview of patients’ goals that do not merely focus on medical issues. It is a challenge for professionals to coach their patients to think about and set their goals themselves. More insight in patients’ willingness and ability to set self-management goals is desirable. Moreover, as goal setting is a circular process, professionals need to be supported to go through this process with their patients.
Objective: Self-management is a core theme within chronic care and several evidence-based interventions (EBIs) exist to promote self-management ability. However, these interventions cannot be adapted in a mere copy-paste manner. The current study describes and demonstrates a planned approach in adapting EBI’s in order to promote self-management in community-dwelling people with chronic conditions. Methods: We used Intervention Mapping (IM) to increase the intervention’s fit with a new context. IM helps researchers to take decisions about whether and what to adapt, while maintaining the working ingredients of existing EBI’s. Results: We present a case study in which we used IM to adapt EBI’s to the Flemish primary care context to promote self-management in people with one or more chronic disease. We present the reader with a contextual analysis, intervention aims, and content, sequence and scope of the resulting intervention. Conclusion: IM provides an excellent framework in providing detailed guidance on intervention adaption to a new context, while preserving the essential working ingredients of EBI’s. Practice Implications: The case study is exemplary for public health researchers and practitioners as a planned approach to seek and find EBI’s, and to make adaptations.
Whitepaper: The use of AI is on the rise in the financial sector. Utilizing machine learning algorithms to make decisions and predictions based on the available data can be highly valuable. AI offers benefits to both financial service providers and its customers by improving service and reducing costs. Examples of AI use cases in the financial sector are: identity verification in client onboarding, transaction data analysis, fraud detection in claims management, anti-money laundering monitoring, price differentiation in car insurance, automated analysis of legal documents, and the processing of loan applications.
Social enterprises (SEs) can play an important role in addressing societal problems. SEs are businesses whose primary objective is to generate social impact (e.g. well-being, social wealth and cohesion, and ecology) through a market-based model. SEs achieve this through a hybrid business model, trading-off financial and social value creation objectives. SEs typically face higher costs, for example because of ethical sourcing principles and/or production processes centering around the needs of workers who are vulnerable or hard-to-employ. This results in SEs’ struggling to scale-up due to their relatively costly operating model. Traditional management techniques are not always appropriate, as they do not take into account the tensions between financial and social value creation objectives of SEs. Our project examines how continuous improvement, and in particular the philosophy and tools of Lean can be harnessed to improve SEs competitiveness. Lean organizations share many values with SEs, such as respect for people, suggesting a good fit between the values and principles of Lean and those of SEs. The consortium for this project is a cooperation between the research groups Improving Business and New Marketing of the Center of Expertise Well-Being Economy and New Entrepreneurship and the minor Continuous Improvement of AVANS Hogeschool, and the SME companies Elliz in Company and Ons Label. The project consists of two phases, an exploratory phase during which the question “in what ways can the philosophy and tools of Lean be used by Social Enterprises?” will be addressed. Interviews and focus groups will be conducted with multiple SEs (not only partners). Participant observation will be conducted by the students of the minor Continuous Improvement at the partner SEs. During the second phase, the implementation of the identified principles and tools will be operationalized through a roadmap. Action research will be conducted in cooperation with the partner SEs.
