51. Referral Management Systems: Minimizing Cost or Facilitating Harm?

Minimizing the Monitoring Cost in Network Management

Many rapidly-changing environments need to be monitored to ensure that they stay within acceptable parameters. The monitoring consists of measuring properties of the environment, and of inferring an aggregate predicate from these measurements. In many cases it is too complex, or too expensive to conduct explicit monitoring at all times. In these cases, information (integrity constraints) on the...

Minimizing Total Calibration Cost

Bender et al. (SPAA 2013) have proposed a theoretical framework for testing in contexts where safety mistakes must be avoided. Testing in such a context is made by machines that need to be often calibrated. Given that calibration costs, it is important to study policies minimizing the calibration cost while performing all the necessary tests. We focus on the single-machine setting and we extend...

Cost-minimizing risk adjustment.

Conventional risk adjustment, which sets capitation payments equal to the average cost of individuals with similar observable characteristics, is not optimal if health plans can use private information to select low-cost enrollees. "Cost-minimizing risk adjustment" minimizes the sum of capitated HMO premiums plus FFS costs by balancing the gains from HMO cost efficiency against the overpayments...

Cost Effectiveness of Laminar Flow Systems for Total Shoulder Arthroplasty: Filtering Money from the OR?

Background: Laminar flow ventilation systems were developed to reduce surgical contamination in joint arthroplastyto avoid periprosthetic joint infection (PJI). The goals of this study are to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and economicviability of installing and maintaining a laminar flow system in an operating room.Methods: A Monte Carlo simulation was used to evaluate the c...

Referral management centres: promising innovations or Trojan horses?