IMPORTANCE Hospitals are rapidly acquiring medical groups and physician practices. This consolidation may foster cooperation and thereby reduce expenditures, but also may lead to higher expenditures through greater use of hospital-based ambulatory services and through greater hospital pricing leverage against health insurers. OBJECTIVE To determine whether total expenditures per patient were ...

This study explores the differences in pollution control performance of industries with different types of ownership – State owned (SOE), collectively or community owned (COE), and privately owned (POE). A theoretic analysis is conducted and followed by an empirical assessment with Chinese data. The empirical results show that the COEs in China have better environmental performances in water po...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether a dose-response relation exists between the number of cigarette promotional items (CPIs) owned by an adolescent, and smoking behaviour. DESIGN AND SETTING Voluntary, self administered survey of 1265 sixth through to 12th grade students (ages 10-19 years), representing 79-95% of all students attending five rural New Hampshire and Vermont public (state funded) school...

Cat predation is a prominent issue in New Zealand that provokes strong and opposing views. We explored, via 1011 face-to-face questionnaires, public opinion on (a) support for a National Cat Management Strategy (78% support); (b) concern regarding predation of wildlife by owned and un-owned cats (managed stray, unmanaged stray, and feral cats); (c) the acceptability of management techniques for...

released in the second half of 2010, there has been a fl urry of articles published across the country noting the increase in Latino businesses since 2002. From Oregon to Arkansas to New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, across rural communities and urban areas, the nation saw dramatic increases in Latino-owned businesses between 2002 and 2007. This article provides an overview of Latino businesses a...

With the spread of Web-Based Social Networks (WBSNs) managing access to data is a challenging matter. Providing personalized, ne-grained access control is essential to build trusted WBSNs. WBSNs data can be associated with owners and co-owners, namely users who upload the data and users who are linked to uploaded data respectively. Thus, a privacy-friendly WBSN must allow users the management o...

BACKGROUND Over the last decade, the use of mobile phone apps in the health care industry has grown rapidly. Owing to the high penetration rate of Internet use in Taiwan, hospitals are eager to provide their own apps to improve the accessibility of medical care for patients. OBJECTIVE The aims of this study were to provide an overview of the currently available hospital-owned apps in Taiwan a...

In general, we agree that improving the accuracy of IPPS payment rates would be desirable. While the emergence of specialty hospitals makes pointed the need for such improvement, we believe such changes should be desirable in any case. Consequently, we are already proceeding to analyze the options MedPAC has discussed. We expect to fully analyze and simulate the changes so we can explore the im...