The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) collects detailed clinical data from participating hospitals using standardized data definitions, analyzes ...these data, and provides participating hospitals with reports that permit risk-adjusted comparisons with a surgical quality standard. Since its inception, the ACS NSQIP has worked to refine surgical outcomes measurements and enhance statistical methods to improve the reliability and validity of this hospital profiling. From an original focus on controlling for between-hospital differences in patient risk factors with logistic regression, ACS NSQIP has added a variable to better adjust for the complexity and risk profile of surgical procedures (procedure mix adjustment) and stabilized estimates derived from small samples by using a hierarchical model with shrinkage adjustment. New models have been developed focusing on specific surgical procedures (eg, “Procedure Targeted” models), which provide opportunities to incorporate indication and other procedure-specific variables and outcomes to improve risk adjustment. In addition, comparative benchmark reports given to participating hospitals have been expanded considerably to allow more detailed evaluations of performance. Finally, procedures have been developed to estimate surgical risk for individual patients. This article describes the development of, and justification for, these new statistical methods and reporting strategies in ACS NSQIP.
Considering debates surrounding the usefulness of integrated reporting for decision‐making, this exploratory study uses objective measures to investigate the quality of disclosures other than ...financial in the basic materials industry of South Africa. Annual and integrated reports for the basic materials and consumer discretionary industries are evaluated over 12 years, from 2008 to 2020 for a total of 1204 firm‐year observations to investigate whether (1) integrated reporting brought positive change and (2) whether reporting improved over time. Readability and narrative tone analyses are conducted, and non‐parametric Kruskal‐Wallis tests are used to investigate the development of these measures over time. The results show that corporate reports in the basic materials industry decreased in quality over time in that the reports have become longer, less readable, and use specific narrative tones, which can create biases. The findings reveal that the declining quality of reports in the basic materials industry could mislead or deter investors, challenge regulatory oversight, and ultimately, impact firms' social licence to operate. Thus, they offer actionable insights for firms to improve disclosure by reducing complexity and length and adopting a neutral narrative tone to mitigate biases, thereby making these reports more accessible and useful for a wider stakeholder audience. In addition, investors ought to demand better reporting, and regulators should tighten guidelines.
Purpose
The UK private finance initiative (PFI) public policy is heavily criticised. PFI contracts are highly profitable leading to incentives for PFI private-sector companies to support PFI public ...policy. This contested nature of PFIs requires legitimation by PFI private-sector companies, by means of impression management, in terms of the attention to and framing of PFI in PFI private-sector company annual reports. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
PFI-related annual report narratives of three UK PFI private-sector companies, over seven years and across two periods of significant change in the development of the PFI public policy, are analysed using manual content analysis.
Findings
Results suggest that PFI private-sector companies use impression management to legitimise during periods of uncertainty for PFI public policy, to alleviate concerns, to provide credibility for the policy and to legitimise the private sector’s own involvement in PFI.
Research limitations/implications
While based on a sizeable database, the research is limited to the study of three PFI private-sector companies.
Originality/value
The portrayal of public policy in annual report narratives has not been subject to prior research. The research demonstrates how managers of PFI private-sector companies present PFI narratives in support of public policy direction that, in turn, benefits PFI private-sector companies.
This study examines the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on firm value for Chinese listed companies in heavily polluting industries from 2010 to 2021. By controlling for the ...level of leverage, growth, and corporate governance, a fixed effects model is constructed to test this relationship. Furthermore, this study analyzes the moderating effects of annual report text features, such as length, similarity, and readability, on the relationship between environmental information disclosure and firm value and the heterogeneous impact of firm ownership on this relationship. The main findings of this study are as follows: There is a positive correlation between the level of environmental information disclosure and firm value for Chinese listed companies in heavily polluting industries. Annual report text length and readability positively moderate the relationship between environmental information disclosure and firm value. Annual report text similarity negatively moderates the relationship between environmental information disclosure and firm value performance. Compared with state-owned enterprises, the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on the firm value of no-state-owned enterprises is more significant.
To provide information including the trend of gynecological malignancies in Japan, we hereby present the Annual Patient Report for 2018 and the Annual Treatment Report for 2013, on the outcomes of ...patients who started treatment in 2013. The Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology maintains an annual tumor registry, where information on gynecological malignancies from various participating institutions is gathered. The data of patients whose treatment with gynecologic malignancies was initiated in 2018 were analyzed retrospectively. Survival of the patients who started treatment with cervical, endometrial, and ovarian cancer in 2013 was analyzed by using the Kaplan–Meier, log‐rank, and Wilcoxson tests. Treatment was initiated in 2018 for 7304 patients with cervical cancer; 11 230 with endometrial cancer; 7031 with ovarian, tubal, and peritoneal cancer; 2072 with ovarian borderline tumors; and with the others (222 vulvar cancer, 159 vaginal cancer, 413 uterine sarcoma, 54 uterine adenosarcoma, and 135 trophoblastic diseases). This clinicopathological information was summarized as the Patient Annual Report. The 5‐year survival rates of the patients with cervical cancer were 93.1%, 75.9%, 59.1%, and 31.2% for Stages I, II, III, and IV, respectively. The 5‐year survival rates for the patients with endometrial cancer were 94.1%, 89.2%, 73.6%, and 25.8% for Stages I, II, III, and IV, respectively. The 5‐year survival rates for the patients with ovarian cancer (surface epithelial‐stromal tumors) were 89.7%, 76.8%, 49.1%, and 32.4% for Stages I, II, III, and IV, respectively. The annual report is important to provide knowledge on gynecological malignancy trends in Japan.
The Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER) approaches a decade of publications since its launch in 2011. This inaugural report presents metrics and statistics on J-PEER's ...readership and authorship, looking specifically at data from 2019, along with reflections from the founding and immediate-past editors.
This paper investigates the relationship between intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance variables, controlling for other firm-specific characteristics, for a sample of 100 UK listed ...firms. Intellectual capital disclosure is measured by a disclosure index score, supported by word count and percentage of word count metrics to assess the variety, volume and focus of intellectual capital disclosure respectively. The independent variables comprise various forms of corporate governance structure: board composition, ownership structure, audit committee size and frequency of audit committee meetings, and CEO role duality. Results of the analysis based on the three measures of intellectual capital disclosure indicate significant association with all the governance factors except for role duality. The influence of corporate governance mechanisms on human, structural and relational capital disclosure, based on all three metrics, is also explored.
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