Macroecological patterns, such as the highly uneven distribution of individuals among species and the monotonic increase of species richness with area, exist across ecological systems despite major differences in the biology of different species and locations. These patterns capture the general structure of ecological communities, and allow relatively accurate predictions to be made with limited information for under-studied systems. This is particularly important given ongoing climate change and loss of biodiversity. Understanding the mechanisms behind these patterns has both scientific and practical merits. I explore two conceptually different approaches that have been proposed as explanations for ecological patterns – the process-based approaches, which directly model key ecological processes such as birth, death, competition, and dispersal; and the constraint-based approaches, which view the patterns as the most likely state when the system is constrained in certain ways (e.g., the system has a fixed number of 100 individuals among five species, but the distribution may vary). While the process-based approaches directly link patterns to processes, the constraint-based approaches do not rely on the operation of specific processes and thus can be more broadly applied. I develop a new constraint-based approach to one of the most well established patterns in ecology, the power-law relationship between the mean and variance of a population. This pattern has been widely observed and adopted as characterization of population stability. I find that the shape of the pattern can be well explained with two numerical constraints on the system, lending support to the idea that some macroecological patterns may not arise from specific processes but be statistical in nature instead. I further examine the performance of the process- and constraint-based approaches for patterns of biodiversity and energy use, which are among the most essential as well as most well-studied aspects of community structure. Candidate models from both categories are able to partially capture the patterns across 60 globally distributed forest communities, however the process-based model is shown to provide a better general characterization of community structure than the constraint-base model in all communities. Thus the constraint-based approaches in their current forms do not fully encapsulate the effect of processes, which also contribute to the shape of the macroecological patterns of biodiversity and body size in addition to the constraints.

Whether it is offering services, delivering solutions or driving innovations, team work has been a hallmark of efficiency and effectiveness in various industries. The healthcare industry is not left out as its service delivery process involves numerous interfaces, information flows and patient hand-offs among professionals with different educational training, differing knowledge levels and possibly working from different locations as well. As healthcare delivery evolves to being more patient-centered, so does the team settings as well, becoming more collaborative. Such changes also translate into a need for support systems to evolve to be able to provide support for the extent of collaboration that would be needed. A framework is needed to guide in the development of such systems. However, due to the varying needs of patients, team types and make-up would generally differ, so we explored the different types of team settings studying what they entail based on their various degrees of collaboration. We therefore present in this thesis a model of team based concepts, an ontology formalizing the model, team based scenarios designed using the ontology and then application of the scenarios to test the ability of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to model healthcare teams.

Whether it is offering services, delivering solutions or driving innovations, team work has been a hallmark of efficiency and effectiveness in various industries. The healthcare industry is not left out as its service delivery process involves numerous interfaces, information flows and patient hand-offs among professionals with different educational training, differing knowledge levels and possibly working from different locations as well. As healthcare delivery evolves to being more patient-centered, so does the team settings as well, becoming more collaborative. Such changes also translate into a need for support systems to evolve to be able to provide support for the extent of collaboration that would be needed. A framework is needed to guide in the development of such systems. However, due to the varying needs of patients, team types and make-up would generally differ, so we explored the different types of team settings studying what they entail based on their various degrees of collaboration. We therefore present in this thesis a model of team based concepts, an ontology formalizing the model, team based scenarios designed using the ontology and then application of the scenarios to test the ability of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to model healthcare teams.

Whether it is offering services, delivering solutions or driving innovations, team work has been a hallmark of efficiency and effectiveness in various industries. The healthcare industry is not left out as its service delivery process involves numerous interfaces, information flows and patient hand-offs among professionals with different educational training, differing knowledge levels and possibly working from different locations as well. As healthcare delivery evolves to being more patient-centered, so does the team settings as well, becoming more collaborative. Such changes also translate into a need for support systems to evolve to be able to provide support for the extent of collaboration that would be needed. A framework is needed to guide in the development of such systems. However, due to the varying needs of patients, team types and make-up would generally differ, so we explored the different types of team settings studying what they entail based on their various degrees of collaboration. We therefore present in this thesis a model of team based concepts, an ontology formalizing the model, team based scenarios designed using the ontology and then application of the scenarios to test the ability of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to model healthcare teams.

Whether it is offering services, delivering solutions or driving innovations, team work has been a hallmark of efficiency and effectiveness in various industries. The healthcare industry is not left out as its service delivery process involves numerous interfaces, information flows and patient hand-offs among professionals with different educational training, differing knowledge levels and possibly working from different locations as well. As healthcare delivery evolves to being more patient-centered, so does the team settings as well, becoming more collaborative. Such changes also translate into a need for support systems to evolve to be able to provide support for the extent of collaboration that would be needed. A framework is needed to guide in the development of such systems. However, due to the varying needs of patients, team types and make-up would generally differ, so we explored the different types of team settings studying what they entail based on their various degrees of collaboration. We therefore present in this thesis a model of team based concepts, an ontology formalizing the model, team based scenarios designed using the ontology and then application of the scenarios to test the ability of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to model healthcare teams.