We examine the effect of a health plan's pay for performance incentives on the percentage of outpatient drug prescriptions that are filled with generic rather than brand-name drugs in physicians' practices in an established physician network - the generic prescription rate (GPR). The financial reward was based on the performance of the entire network, but the network implemented rewards at the ...

This paper presents an automatic feature recognition method based on center-surround difference detecting and fuzzy logic that can be applied in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) image processing. Adopted center-surround difference method, the salient local image regions are extracted from the GPR images as features of detected objects. And fuzzy logic strategy is used to match the detected featur...

Gaussian process regression (GPR) is a powerful non-linear technique for Bayesian inference and prediction. One drawback is its O(N) computational complexity for both prediction and hyperparameter estimation for N input points which has led to much work in sparse GPR methods. In case that the covariance function is expressible as a tensor product kernel (TPK) and the inputs form a multidimensio...

As a nondestructive geophysical tool, Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been applied in tree root study in recent years. With increasing amounts of GPR data collected for roots, it is imperative to develop an efficient automatic recognition of roots in GPR images. However, few works have been completed on this topic because of the complexity in root recognition problem. Based on GPR datasets f...

–In this paper, we propose new generalized partial response (GPR) targets for perpendicular recording whose transition response is modeled as an error function, and compare their performance with the partial response (PR) targets both in the presence and in the absence of jitter noise. Regardless of any jitter noise amount, results indicate that the GPR targets outperform the PR targets, especi...

Many distributed applications require transactions. However, transactional protocols that require strong synchronization are costly in large scale environments. Two properties help with scalability of a transactional system: genuine partial replication (GPR), which leverages the intrinsic parallelism of a workload, and snapshot isolation (SI), which decreases the need for synchronization. We sh...

the subsoil and groundwater were suspected to be polluted by leakage from underground tanks around the oil storage facility in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India. to delineate the seepage zone, integrated geophysical methods comprising Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and 2D electrical Resistivity Imaging (eRI) methods were employed over the suspected zone and in the close vicinity. the studies were condu...