Medicare could become an innovative leader in using financial incentives to reward health care providers for providing excellent and efficient care throughout a patient's illness. This article examines the variations in cost and quality in the provision of episodes of care and describes how a pay-for-performance payment system could be designed to narrow those variations and serve as a transiti...

Service platforms based on network are becoming even more important to physical end-products and services industry. As service platforms will become the founding infrastructure of our economies, the understanding of the value that a service platform can create is of great importance. The development of technology enhances a new way to create the value. Involving customers to co-create value is ...

The simultaneity of decreasing fertility and changing family structures in many European countries has led to a growing interest in fertility behavior in its relation to different family structures. The growing prevalence of higher-order unions (and the consequences for parity progression arising therefrom) is one example of an ongoing change in fertility behavior. Childbearing is not restric...

More than 35% of Medicare beneficiaries receive care from providers operating under some form of shared savings/risk type of pay-for-performance incentive. Implementation of payment reform without a corresponding change to coverage, benefit, and other payment requirements, however, creates conflicting incentives that may nullify the intended aim of payment reform: to improve health outcomes, wh...

Software services offer the opportunity to use a component-based approach for the design of applications. However, this needs a deeper understanding of how to develop service-based applications in a systematic manner, and of the set of properties that need to be included in the 'design model'. We have used a realistic application to explore systematically how service-based designs can be create...

Fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy (FFS) quantifies interactions of fluorescently labeled proteins inside living cells by brightness analysis. Conventional FFS implicitly requires that the sample thickness exceeds the size of the observation volume. This condition is not always fulfilled when measuring cells. Cytoplasmic sections, especially, can be thinner than the axial size of the observa...

BACKGROUND Pediatric rehabilitation considers Family-centered service (FCS) as a way to increase participation of children with a physical disability in daily life. An important principal is that parents greatly contribute to their child's participation at school, at home, and in the community. However, it is unclear what kind of information is available from literature about what parents actua...

Health care payers have implemented pay-for-performance contracts without explicit characterization of the underlying quality problem or an understanding of the interaction between pay-for-performance and existing payment mechanisms. In this paper, ine cient quality of health care services stems from di culty consumers have in observing some aspects of quality. Traditional health care payment s...

The present study was conducted to define the variables affecting payment mechanism for strategic purchasing in the indirect health section of Iranian Social Security Organization of Iran, by which the Organization can provide the insured with better services while controlling the cost. 13 variables affecting payment mechanism for strategic purchasing were determined. A questionnaire was prepar...