Although an increasing number of hospitals are reporting net losses from the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS) for inpatient care, overall hospital facility profit rates remain stable. Hospitals that reported net profits in the Medicare inpatient PPS sector in PPS 7 (1990) had smaller increases in Medicare expenses than hospitals that reported PPS losses in PPS 7. Medicare PPS inpatient...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to evaluate the epidemiology of infection in Polish long-term care facilities (LTCFs) and to analyse the capabilities and legitimacy of implementing continuous targeted surveillance. METHODS The study investigated the relationship between the presence of infection and health status, tested using a point prevalence study (PPS) and incidence study. A 1-...

In many organizations and financial institutions, we don't always have acsses to inputs and outputs to evaluate the decision-making units (DMUs), but rather only a ratio of inputs to outputs ( or reverse) might be available. In DEA, cost efficiency determines input standards based on input costs. In multi-stage network DEA processes, in addition to input standards, cost efficiency would determi...

Mobile Devices are now ubiquitous in the enterprise, enabling flexible working and new business opportunities. However, the protection of enterprise data on mobile devices is a difficult contemporary business problem. A set of three Mobility Protection Profiles (PPs) have been released under the Common Criteria (CC) standard. The Mobility PPs aim to provide a comprehensive set of Security Funct...

Family members' helpful and harmful actions affect adherence to self-care and glycemic control among adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and low socioeconomic status. Few family interventions for adults with T2D address harmful actions or use text messages to reach family members. Through user-centered design and iterative usability/feasibility testing, we developed a mHealth intervention for dis...

Bacillus subtilis YB8 produces the lipopeptide antibiotic plipastatin. B. subtilis MI113, which is a derivative of strain 168, was converted into a new plipastatin producer, strain 406, by competence transformation with the chromosomal DNA of YB8. Transposon mini-Tn10 insertional mutagenesis was applied to strain 406, which revealed that lpa-8 (sfp) (encoding 4'-phosphopantetheinyl transferase)...

  Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a non-parametric method for assessing relative efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs). Every single decision-maker with the use of inputs produces outputs. These decision-making units will be defined by the production possibility set. Resource allocation to DMUs is one of the concerns of managers since managers can employ the results of this process to a...