Prospective payments systems (diagnosis-related groups, DRG) to reimburse hospital inpatient care became very popular two decades ago (Ellis and McGuire, 1993). DRGs, however, may incentivize dishonest provider behavior, like inappropriately early discharge of patients, withholding of (necessary) diagnostics and therapies, cream-skimming of low-cost patients or coding of patients into groups wi...

Digital technologies have identified themselves in several application domains. This has resulted massive data availability over the internet. These web contents are generally too long to read. The reader, therefore, skims matter because of limited time available while focusing on understanding concept subject. A hypothesis suggests that full-screen skimming provides a better ideas as compared ...

Reading newspapers may be seen as an "everyday cognitive task". Therefore it is not astonishing that some work in Artificial Intelligence aims at the simulation of aspects of the understanding processes of newspaper readers [Eisenstadt 1977; Rosenberg 1977]. There have even been pioneering system~: the Script ~0plier Mechanism [Cullingford 1978] demonstrated careful reading of "event~--oriented...

The increasing prominence of the private sector in health care provision has generated considerable interest in understanding its implications on quality and cost. This paper investigates the phenomenon of cream skimming in a mixed public-private hospital setting using the novel approach of analysing hospital transfers. We analyse hospital administrative data of patients with ischemic heart dis...

Can Plasma Skimming or Inconstancy of Regional Hematocrit Introduce Serious Errors in Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Measurements or Their Interpretation? • Recent reports indicate that in cases of elevated plasma or blood viscosity, red cell velocity through the cerebral microcirculation is unimpaired while plasma transit is retarded. One explanation may be that plasma skimming is increased, wit...