Using a Workflow to Reduce Database Costs without Affecting Collection Needs

Weekly ventilator circuit changes. A strategy to reduce costs without affecting pneumonia rates.

BACKGROUND Mechanical ventilator circuits are commonly changed at 48-h intervals. This frequency may be unnecessary because ventilator-associated pneumonia often results from aspiration of pharyngeal secretions and not from the ventilator circuit. We compared the ventilator-associated pneumonia rates and costs associated with 48-h and 7-day circuit changes. METHODS Ventilator circuits were ch...

Reduce healthcare costs without sacrificing quality and flexibility.

Building a Database to Predict Customer Needs

Since the early 1990s, organizations have used data warehouses and data-mining tools for business planning and decision-making. For example, more than 95 percent of the 250 companies surveyed by the Meta Group in 1995 said they planned to build a data warehouse, up from only 15 percent in 1994. Data warehouses and data-mining tools are able to provide a retrospective look at customer behavior t...

Wide Variability in Emergency Physician Admission Rates: A Target to Reduce Costs Without Compromising Quality

INTRODUCTION Attending physician judgment is the traditional standard of care for emergency department (ED) admission decisions. The extent to which variability in admission decisions affect cost and quality is not well understood. We sought to determine the impact of variability in admission decisions on cost and quality. METHODS We performed a retrospective observational study of patients p...

Using web-based technology in laboratory instruction to reduce costs

The authors report the results of a project to reemphasize high quality, hands-on laboratory courses in the engineering curriculum while reducing their costs through the application of web-based teaching tools. The project resulted in substantial gains in productivity of faculty and staff, increased utilization of laboratory space, cost reductions in equipment, and improved quality of learning ...