BACKGROUND Few data are available that provide estimates of the economic impact of chronic lower back pain (CLBP) in Japan. The current study estimated the patient burden and the direct and indirect medical costs associated with CLBP in Japan using data from a large cross-sectional patient survey. CLBP was hypothesized to be associated with a considerable burden of illness and a large economic ...

PURPOSE Asthma-related morbidity and mortality are increasing, and the financial burden imposed by this condition will substantially increase. Nevertheless, little information is available regarding the nature and magnitude of the burden due to asthma at the national level. This study was conducted to characterize the financial burden imposed by asthma in the Republic of Korea at the national l...

The poor-quality costs in construction projects are traditionally estimated to 1-10% of the total project cost. These estimations normally include the projects’ own processes. However, in Sweden more than 50% of the costs for producing buildings are taxes. To better understand the total poor-quality costs there should also be an analysis of the processes financed by the taxes. This paper aims t...

Quality costs are the costs associated with preventing, finding, and correcting defective work. Since the main language of corporate management is money, quality-related costs act as means of communication between the staff of quality engineering departments and the company managers. The objective of quality engineering is to minimize the total quality cost across the life of product. Quality c...

BACKGROUND Many believe that computerization will improve health care quality, reduce costs, and increase administrative efficiency. However, no previous studies have examined computerization's cost and quality impacts at a diverse national sample of hospitals. METHODS We linked data from an annual survey of computerization at approximately 4000 hospitals for the period from 2003 to 2007 with...

background: disease-modifying drugs (dmds) are a significant expenditure for treating multiple sclerosis (ms). however, there is limited report on assessment of the cost-utility of dmds compared with symptom management in the presence of long-term data. this study aimed to assess the lifetime cost-utility from the iranian healthcare perspectives of 4dmds relative to symptom management alone in ...

mcdonough’s perspective on healthcare reform in the us provides a clear, coherent analysis of the mix of access and delivery reforms in the affordable care act (aca) aka obamacare. as noted by mcdonough, this major reform bill is designed to expand access for health coverage that includes both prevention and treatment benefits among uninsured americans. additionally, this legislation includes s...

this study presents a detailed analysis of cost management for intensive cultivation activity in terms of tomato production. the main objective was to provide qualitative and quantitative costs obtained in the intensive cultivation of tomato. this methodology was structured by activity costs (soil preparation and planting, crop monitoring, harvesting, selling, etc.) through a study in greenhous...

achieving optimal production cycle time for improving manufacturing processes is one of the common problems in production planning. during recent years, different approaches have been developed for solving this problem, but most of them assume that mean quality characteristic is constant over production run length and sets it on customer’s target value. however, the process mean may drift from ...

This paper shows how Quality Costs can be a measure of software quality. The relationship between Quality Costs and other software quality metrics is briefly explained, and software development oriented versions of the two principal Quality Cost models are described. Finally the paper discusses the major issues involved in setting up a software Quality Cost programme. The concepts are based on ...