IMPORTANCE The Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Model aims to drive health care organizations to reduce expenditures while improving quality for fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare beneficiaries. OBJECTIVE To determine whether FFS beneficiaries aligned with Pioneer ACOs had smaller increases in spending and utilization than other FFS beneficiaries while retaining similar levels of care ...

We give details on solving the discrete logarithm problem in the 202-bit prime order subgroup of F2809 using the Function Field Sieve algorithm (FFS). To our knowledge, this computation is the largest discrete logarithm computation so far in a binary field extension of prime degree. The Function Field Sieve is the traditional approach for solving these problems, and has been used in previous re...

Objective. To assess the impact of switching from a fee-for-service (FFS) delivery system to managed care on access to, use of, and satisfaction with health care for children. Data Sources/Study Setting. A 1998 survey of Medicaid recipients in rural Minnesota. Study Design. Using a quasi-experimental framework, we compare the experiences of children on Medicaid living in counties that had switc...

OBJECTIVE The AVOID-FFS (Avoidance of Far-Field R-wave Sensing) study aimed to investigate whether an atrial lead with a very short tip-to-ring spacing without optimization of pacemaker settings shows equally low incidence of far-field R-wave sensing (FFS) when compared to a conventional atrial lead in combination with optimization of the programming. METHODS Patients receiving a dual chamber...

There have been no published empirical studies comparing the experiences of terminally ill patients in managed care organizations (MCOs) and those in fee for service (FFS). This investigation represents the first empirical study to systematically compare substantive outcomes between populations of terminally ill patients enrolled in MCO and FFS healthcare delivery systems. The investigators int...

PURPOSE To evaluate clinical and tumor characteristics in patients receiving high-dose chemotherapy and autologous peripheral stem-cell transplantation (PSCT) or bone marrow transplantation (ABMT) for relapsed or primary refractory non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). PATIENTS AND METHODS One hundred fifty-eight patients with NHL received high-dose chemotherapy and ABMT or PSCT. A multivariate analy...

UNLABELLED WHAT DID WE DO?: As the amount of alternative funding for physician services grows in Canada, the usefulness of fee-for-services (FFS) payment data as a source of population-based information declines. This paper describes methods used to develop and validate an anonymous registry of the physician workforce to support policy-relevant analyses in environments where doctors are increas...

Several graph matching and exact covering problems arising in VLSI low-power design optimization by clock gating are presented. To maximize the power savings, clock gating requires optimal grouping of Flip-Flops (FFs), which depends on FFs’ data toggling correlations and probabilities. These naturally lead to optimal matching and exact covering problems. We present three problems arising by dif...

In this paper, we deal with the case that aggressor is a data line and victim is a clock line. And we assume that aggressor and victim corresponds to one-to-one. In addition, we handle the circuit that a clock buffer is inserted in the clock line of every FF. Hence, only one FF is affected by an additional clock as shown hatched FF in Fig. 1. In the proposed BIST circuit, switches are inserted ...

BACKGROUND As healthcare spending continues to increase, reimbursement cuts have become 1 type of healthcare reform to contain costs. Little is known about the long-term impact of cuts in reimbursement, especially under a global budget cap with fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement, on processes and outcomes of care. The FFS-based reimbursement cuts have been implemented since July 2002 in Taiwan...