BACKGROUND Although uncomplicated acute renal failure (ARF) is associated with significant hospital resource utilization, its health care requirements following hospital discharge are not well understood. The goal of this study was to characterize the post-hospital care requirements incurred by patients with uncomplicated ARF and to determine its important influencing factors. METHODS We obta...

To identify risk factors for failure of OPAT (outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy) among veterans with SAB (Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia), a retrospective review was conducted of all patients receiving OPAT for SAB between 01/2011-09/2013 at a large, tertiary-care VA (Veterans’ Affairs) medical center. Treatment failure was defined as incomplete therapy, therapy extension, infection...

OBJECTIVES The goal of this study was to identify potentially novel laboratory markers of risk in chronic heart failure patients. BACKGROUND Although a variety of prognostic markers have been described in heart failure, a systematic assessment of routine laboratory values has not been reported. METHODS All 2,679 symptomatic chronic heart failure patients from the North American CHARM (Cande...

the decisions made in the planning phase of a building project greatly affect its future operation and maintenance (o&m;) cost. recognizing the o&m; cost of condominiums’ common facilities as a critical issue for home owners, this research aims to develop an artificial neural network (ann) o&m; cost prediction model to assist developers and architects in effectively assessing the impacts of the...

Network location models comprise one of the main categories of location models. These models have various applications in regional and urban planning as well as in transportation, distribution, and energy management. In a network location problem, nodes represent demand points and candidate locations to locate the facilities. If the links network is unchangeably determined, the problem will be ...

Facility location-network design (FLND) problem, which determines the location of facilities and also communication links between the demand and facility nodes, is arisen from the combination of the facility location and network design problems. This paper deals with fuzzy capacitated facility location-network design model which aims to select the facilities and candidate links in a way that yi...