The use of cost-effectiveness as final criterion in the reimbursement process for listing of new pharmaceuticals can be questioned from a scientific and policy point of view. There is a lack of consensus on main methodological issues and consequently we may question the appropriateness of the use of cost-effectiveness data in health care decision-making. Another concern is the appropriateness o...

Clustering is an important tool for data mining, since it can identify major patterns or trends without any supervision (labeled data). Over the past five years, semi-supervised (constrained) clustering methods have become very popular. These methods began with incorporating pairwise constraints and have developed into more general methods that can learn appropriate distance metrics. However, s...

This Issue Brief closely examines expenditures on prescription drugs, and discusses their potential to substitute for other types of health care services. In addition, it describes employer coverage of prescription drugs, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, and potential legislation affecting the prescription drug market. Prescription drug expenditures grew at double-digit rat...

Overlay networks are becoming a popular vehicle for deploying advanced services in the Internet. One such service is multicast. Unlike conventional IP multicast, which requires universal deployment of network layer mechanisms, the overlay multicast model leverages the existing unicast mechanism and offers many service flexibilities to applications. Implementing multicast without requiring netwo...

Little attention has been devoted in policy circles as to how Medicare would manage an outpatient prescription drug benefit. This article, first, discusses the role of the pharmacy benefits manager (PBM), the entity that processes claims and otherwise helps administer the benefit. It then discusses the major decisions that will be necessary regarding such matters as: which drugs should be cover...

Many auction mechanisms, including rst and second-price ascending and sealed-bid auctions, have been proposed and analyzed in the economics literature. We compare the usefulness of di erent mechanisms for on-line auctions, focusing on the di erent costs of determining reservation prices, determining bids and communicating bids, and on whether the auctioneer is trusted. Di erent auction formats ...

Cost control and schedule control are two of the most important management functions in the construction industry. Major research efforts are focused on developing procedures for improving the effectiveness of cost and schedule control. As a result, researchers are concerned with the quality, integrity, and timeliness of data that flow through such control systems. A number of data models have ...

BACKGROUND Given the characteristics of health care expenditure/cost data-a mass of observations at zero, and skewed positive expenditures, various alternative estimators have been developed that can address the analytical issues these characteristics raise. The field continues to develop new approaches and to evaluate the performance of the existing ones. OBJECTIVES We discuss the strengths ...