Confirmation of mutations mostly involves DNA sequencing. The conventional manual radioactive labeling sequencing protocol may be conceived as the method of choice because of the perception that the capital and operational costs of automated sequencers are high. Velickovic et al. (3) reduced the cost of DNA sequencing by running 48 or 64 samples on a 36-lane model 377-01 ABI PRISM automated se...

Chest pain is a common complaint in emergency departments. Several guidelines and tools exist to help the clinician determine need for hospitalization. For low-risk patients, clinical judgment can underestimate a patient's risk of major adverse cardiac event. Implementation of an advanced diagnostic protocol with the HEART Pathway can reduce hospital cost. For our academic institution, we saw a...

BACKGROUND The use of angiotensin-receptor blockers increased by more than 4000% in Canada from 1996 to 2006. The benefit of these medications over angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitors has not been proven aside from a reduction in dry cough. We estimated the potential cost savings that might have been achieved had access to angiotensin-receptor blockers been restricted. METHODS We p...

Economic impacts of agricultural carbon sequestration involve direct costs of sequestration management adoption as well as a variety of indirect costs and benefits. The nature and significance of these impacts are discussed. Spatial and temporal heterogeneity in agriculture is identified as an influential factor. Techniques to estimate the cost of agricultural carbon sequestration are briefly r...

Energy simulation models are developed with EnergyPlus for two office buildings in a R&D center in Shanghai, China to evaluate the energy cost savings of green building design options compared with the baseline building. As a R&D center of an international IT corporation, there are data centers in the two buildings, which make them different from typical office buildings. The data centers house...

We describe a novel device that can be used for the transcervical transfer of embryos into pseudopregnant female mice. This nonsurgical embryo transfer (NSET) device is as efficient as standard surgical embryo transfer in the production of transgenic mice, and can also be used for the transfer of embryonic stem cell-containing chimeric blastocysts and cryopreserved embryos. In addition to the e...

Administration of beta-agonist bronchodilators by metered-dose inhaler (MDI) is as effective as administration by hand-held nebulizer (NEB). Recent studies have suggested that MDI therapy is less costly to administer and that routine substitution of MDI for NEB would result in considerable savings to patients and to hospitals. To our knowledge, the actual extent to which MDI therapy would repla...

Medication errors may lead to adverse drug events (ADEs), which endangers patient safety and increases healthcare-related costs. The on-ward deployment of clinical pharmacists has been shown to reduce preventable ADEs, and save costs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ADEs prevention and cost-saving effects by clinical pharmacist deployment in a nephrology ward.This was a retrospect...

We estimate treatment cost-savings from early cancer diagnosis. For breast, lung, prostate and colorectal cancers and melanoma, which account for more than 50% of new incidences projected in 2017, we combine published cancer treatment cost estimates by stage with incidence rates by stage at diagnosis. We extrapolate to other cancer sites by using estimated national expenditures and incidence ra...

INTRODUCTION Improving health systems performance, especially in low-resource settings facing complex disease burdens, can improve population health. Specifically, the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chains and procurement processes for pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other health products has important implications for health system performance. Pharmaceuticals, vaccines and other health ...