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According to the Census, racial/ethnic minority populations are growing at such a fast rate that by 2050 more than 50% of the population will belong to a minority group (US Census, 2001). The increasing diversity of the U.S. population is one of the many changes that health care delivery organizations need to proactively address in order to better serve their community and improve their performance. In this paper, we argue that cultural competency not only is important from a societal perspective, i.e., reducing health disparities, but can also be a strategy for health care organizations to improve quality, lower cost, and attract customers. We provide detailed recommendations for health care leaders and managers to adopt in order to successfully serve a diverse patient population.

Academic libraries are undergoing a paradigm shift of service, due to various changes in their environment and internally. The maker culture is one of these factors and implies challenges regarding space, infrastructures, and services organization. This situation extends to research support services, in which the users have a particular informative behavior. This chapter aims to analyze whether the academic library has created research support services adapted to the era of maker culture. It examines how research is a key factor in the higher education system to contextualize the importance of research support services in academic libraries. How the researcher accepts or not the role of academic libraries in the process of production and communication of research is studied. As critical elements of the process, we examine part of researcher information behavior in the era of maker culture and the relationship of these users with librarians.

As health care delivery becomes increasingly focused on patient-centered models, interventions such as patient navigation that have the potential to improve care coordination garner interest from health care managers and clinicians. The ability to understand how and to what extent patient navigation is successful in addressing coordination issues, however, is hampered by multiple definitions, vague boundaries, and different contextual implementations of patient navigation. Using a systematic review strategy and classification method, we review both the conceptual and empirical literature regarding navigation in multiple clinical contexts. We then describe and conceptualize variation in how patient navigation has been defined, implemented, and theorized to affect outcomes. This review suggests that patient navigation varies along multiple dimensions and that the variation is related to differing resources, constraints, and goals. We propose a conceptual model to frame further research and suggest that research in this area must carefully account for this variation in order to accurately assess the benefits of patient navigation and provide actionable knowledge for managers.

Building multilingual resources and providing multilingual services have always been important tasks for Chinese academic libraries, but they are also the difficult issues that the libraries are facing. In this chapter, we present a survey conducted on six different academic libraries for collecting data on multilingual resource building, on the usages of the multilingual resources and on multilingual services. Each of our survey to an academic library consisted of four interviews to the library administrator and the librarians of the book, periodical and database departments. Our goal in this chapter is to examine multilingual resources and services in academic libraries in China. The study results confirm several conclusions from the literature about multilingual resources and services in Chinese academic libraries, and at the same time, the results also reveal original insights on possible strategic decision on focusing on multilingual databases and books, and on the problem of lacking adoption of translation-based technologies such as cross-language information access and machine translation in improving the usages of multilingual collections and services.