News Room

Weeks before states expect to receive their first shipments of Covid-19 vaccines, conflicting messages from the federal government have obscured exactly how many doses may arrive. Some governors, including New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, have made splashy announcements about how much of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s vaccines they expect should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorize them this month. Other states can’t provide a solid answer given how quickly estimates change.

With two vaccines expected to receive federal approval in the U.S. within a matter of weeks, hopes for beating the coronavirus are looking up. Yet for millions of workers and businesses, the emerging treatments also raise a host of questions, not the least of which is this: Can your employer require that you get vaccinated? For now, vaccination plans are focused on prioritizing who will receive the first doses, beginning with those who are most vulnerable as well as most exposed to the disease. But employers will soon have to consider how to communicate with their workforces about the vaccine and decide whether to require staffers to get vaccinated as part of their duty to keep their workers, clients and communities safe.

Adoption of telemedicine in emergency departments leads to better quality of care and patient satisfaction, according to a new study published in the INFORMS Journal Information Systems Research. Emergency room telemedicine adoption shortened average length of stay and wait time significantly based on New York emergency room data from 2010 to 2014. This is a crucial finding as emergency departments face overcrowding and critical shortages of emergency care physicians, particularly as COVID-19 stresses hospital capacity across the country.

Social media has forever changed our society and how people do business. A 2013 report by J.D. Power found nearly two-thirds of customers have used a company's social media site to connect with customer service. New research in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research finds businesses that use Twitter as a social care channel are seeing a 19% increase in customer satisfaction.

It’s almost impossible for humans to draw unbiased maps, even when they’re trying. A new mathematical method developed by Cornell researchers can inject fairness into the fraught process of political redistricting – and proves that it takes more than good intent to create a fair and representative district. The two-step method, described in the paper, “Fairmandering: A Column Generation Heuristic for Fairness Optimized Political Districting,” first creates billions of potential electoral maps for each state, and then algorithmically identifies a range of possibilities meeting the desired criteria for fairness.