In 2012, the Medicare program paid private health plans $136 billion to cover about 13 million beneficiaries who received Part A and B benefits through the Medicare Advantage (MA) program rather than traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare. Private plans have been a part of the program since the 1970s. Debate about the policy goals--Should they cost less per beneficiary than FFS Medicare? Sh...

Starting around 2006, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) progressively reduced Fee-for-Service (M-FFS) payments principal noninvasive cardiac tests, when performed in a cardiologist office (Office), yet kept flat to increasing same hospital-based outpatient (HBO) setting. This produced growing gap between HBO Office thus an incentive hospitals acquire cardiology practices orde...

CONTEXT Trust is the cornerstone of the patient-physician relationship. Payment methods that place physicians at financial risk have raised concerns about patients' trust in physicians to act in patients' best interests. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the extent to which methods of physician payment are related to patient trust. DESIGN Cross-sectional telephone interview survey done between January ...

This paper develops a simple model of payment incentives and empirically evaluates provider payment reform in Hainan Province, China. We use a pre-post study design with a control group to analyse two years of claims data to assess the impact of a January 1997 change to prospective payment for a sub-sample of the hospitals. This difference-in-difference empirical strategy allows us to isolate t...

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...

OBJECTIVE The new contract for primary care in the UK offers fee-for-service (FFS) payments for a wide range of activities in a quality outcomes framework (QOF), with payments designed to reflect likely workload. This study aims to explore the link between these financial incentives and the likely population health gains. METHODS The study examines a subset of eight preventive interventions c...

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...