Trillion dollar streets

Health Affairs A Trillion - Dollar Geography Lesson

Dartmouth researchers have demonstrated that there is tremendous geographic variation in the efficiency of health care delivery systems, fostered by perverse incentives that penalize integration, reward fragmentation, and encourage the use of technologies in the “gray areas” of medicine. This research suggests that it is possible to deliver higher-quality care at lower cost. We argue that integ...

Information technology: the trillion-dollar opportunity

The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

We examine the heterogeneous relationship between the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) and hospital operating costs at thousands of U.S. hospitals between 1996 and 2009. Combining data from multiple sources, we first identify a puzzle that has been seen in prior studies: Adoption of EMR is generally associated with a slight increase in costs. We draw on the literature on information...

The abnormal climate response of the DICE integrated assessment model – a trillion dollar error?

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) combine simple models of the carbon cycle and of the response of the climate system to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration with models of economic growth that incorporate the effects of imposing a carbon tax. They calculate the resulting social utility after estimated damages from climate change and costs of measures adopted – as a resul...

The Trillion-Node Network

It is widely accepted that in the foreseeable future the worldwide network of computing devices will grow to billions, or even tens of billions of nodes. However, if we broaden our consideration to include networks of information devices (all artificial systems that deal in any way with information), then we are likely to be faced with much larger numbers. A network of one trillion devices is n...