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Purpose – Hospitals need to determine if an international patient department is a necessity to communicate with and manage international patients.

Design/Methodology/Approach – A benchmarking instrument was created to assess the level of professionalism in managing international patients, including reviewing and validating processes by two university hospitals, professionals, and an expert panel.

Findings – First, the differences between the hospitals depended on the will of the hospital to engage in such activities. Second, the differences depended on the embedding national context in which the hospital was situated. Further validation revealed the importance of other supportive services, such as cultural sensitivity and language. Finally, the microlevel phenomenon of international patient departments is placed within a macrolevel transnational health region development scheme.

Originality/Value – This study focused on the supply of services with respect to international patient departments, which could be related to efficiency and sustainability on a public health and health systems level.

Facebook has become an essential part of student life for most college students; it serves not only as a primary tool of communication but also electronic socialization (Golder, Wilkinson, & Huberman, 2007). Indeed, the vast majority of college students have a Facebook account and are spending a considerable amount of time logged in (Salaway, Caruso, & Nelson, 2008). Yet, can this predominately social space also become a place for learning? To date, the reactions of using social network sites for educational purposes are mixed and empirical research is limited. Issues relating to privacy and safety and an erosion of professional boundaries are the primary reasons cited to not employ social network sites in a classroom. However, other researchers have supported the notion of using social network sites in education (Greenhow & Robelia, 2009a, 2009b; Tynes, B. M. (2007). Internet safety gone wild?: Sacrificing the Educational and Psychosocial benefits of online social environments. Journal of Adolescent Research, 22(6), 575–584. Available at http://jar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/6/575. Retrieved on March 25, 2010; Muñoz, C. L., & Towner, T. (2010). Social networks: Facebook's role in the advertising classroom. Journal of Advertising Education, 14(1), 20–27). This chapter serves to further this discussion by sharing the findings from surveys of instructors and students regarding their attitudes toward Facebook. Specifically, we report how each use Facebook both socially and professionally. Most important, we discuss instructors and students' perceptions of Facebook as an informal and formal teaching tool, particularly its effectiveness as an instructional or course tool, communication device, and in assisting students in their education and learning. Drawing on the survey and experiences using Facebook in multiple classroom settings, we pose specific suggestions on how instructors should use Facebook. In conclusion, the chapter supports the thesis that Facebook and education can indeed be connected.

Economic globalization is leading large companies to focus on international strategic management. Nowadays, the assets referred to as “corporate intangibles,” such as corporate reputation, are becoming increasingly important because they are considered a key factor for the viability of an organization, and companies therefore need to incorporate them into their scorecards for management. The problem is that their measurement is subjective and latent. These two characteristics impede direct international comparison and require demonstrating the accuracy of comparison via a minimum of two tests – construct equivalence and metric equivalence. As regards corporate reputation, construct equivalence was verified by Naomi Gardberg (2006). However, the subsequent studies did not address metric equivalence. Based on the results of a survey provided by the Reputation Institute (n = 5,950, 50 firms evaluated in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia), the degree of RepTrak metric equivalence has been tested, using two different methodologies, multigroup analysis (structural equation model), and a new technique from 2016, the Measurement Invariance of Composite Model procedure from the Partial Least Square Path Modeling family. As one would expect from other cross-cultural studies, reputation metrics do not meet the full metric equivalence, which is why they require standardization processes to ensure international comparability. Both methodologies have identified the same correction parameters, which have allowed validation of the mean and variance of response style by country.