Background: Open heart surgery is a prevalent therapeutic intervention for cardiovascular diseases. Significant adverse effects occur after heart surgery, one of which is patient readmission to the hospital. Objective: The present study aimed to determine the relationship between performance indicators and the readmission of patients with open heart surge...

BACKGROUND Hospital certification and recognition programs represent 2 independent but commonly used systems to distinguish hospitals, yet they have not been directly compared. This study assessed acute ischemic stroke quality of care measure conformity by hospitals receiving Primary Stroke Center (PSC) certification and those receiving the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines-S...

In July 2003, Premier, Inc. and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project (HQI), a three-year program designed to determine if financial incentives are effective at improving the quality of inpatient care. In the demonstration, CMS will measure performance and pay incentives to participating hospitals that achieve superior...

Background and Objectives: Responsiveness is one of the hallmarks of high performance health systems. Maintaining the responsiveness of health organizations at high level, require constant assessment of its situation as perceived by the patients. The accumulation of data on patients’ perception of health organizations’ responsiveness can help policy-makers in developing effective relevant strat...

Background and Objectives: In recent decades medical errors have become a major issue for scientific investigation to avoid potential harmful failures threatening patients’ health and safety. Developing risk management culture has been considered not only to play an important role in detecting and coping effectively with such errors but also lead to high level ...

We investigate whether the modern management practices and publicly reported performance measures are associated with choice of hospital for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). We define and measure management practices at approximately half of US cardiac care units using a novel survey approach. A patient's choice of a hospital is modeled as a function of the hospital's performanc...

Palmer [1] has the advantage of being simple to implement and have good performances compared to the other similarity measures [2]. Nevertheless, the Wu and Palmer measure present the following disadvantage: in some situations, the similarity of two elements of an IS-A ontology contained in the neighborhood exceeds the similarity value of two elements contained in the same hierarchy. This situa...

In this paper, we consider the throughput modelling and fairness provisioning in CSMNCA based ad-hoc networks. The main contributions am: Firstly, a throughput model based on Markovian analysis is proposed for the CSMNCA network with a general topology. Simulation investigations are presented to verify its performance. Secondly, fairness issues in CSMMCA networks are discussed based on the thro...