Opinions are deeply divided over whether rewarding physicians for lowering costs decreases trust in physicians or insurers. To explore the effects of disclosing physician payment methods in HMOs, members of two similar HMO plans were randomized to intervention and control groups, and the experimental arm was told how the HMO paid their primary care physician. Separate disclosures were developed...

Maintenance costs of Information Systems (ISs) are high and are growing. Part of the costs come from low software quality. The quality of software can be measured when it is maintained. By improving the quality of maintenance prone modules future maintenance costs may be lowered for those modules. In this article we will discuss how to measure software quality and we will also present a prototy...

Three replications of mouse selection populations for high heat loss (MH), low heat loss (ML), and a nonselected control (MC) were used to estimate the feed energy costs of maintenance and gain and to test whether selection had changed these costs. At 21 and 49 d of age, mice were weighed and subjected to dual x-ray densitometry measurement for prediction of body composition. At 21 d, mice were...

Preventive maintenance actions over the warranty period have an impact on the warranty servicing cost to the manufacturer and the cost to the buyer of fixing failures over the life of the product after the warranty expires. However, preventive maintenance costs money and is worthwhile only when these costs exceed the reduction in other costs. The paper deals with a model to determine when preve...

PT BBI is a company engaged in producing machinery, industrial equipment, and foundry. has overgrown as that focuses on manufacturing delivering products such oil gas/refinery/petrochemical industries, power plans, iron castings, precision machinery centers, etc. uses various kinds of machines to support its production process. Some devices have often experienced damage caused downtime recent y...

Rapid growth in a number of vehicles on roadways accelerates pavement deterioration trends. Pavement inefficiency in carrying the applied load from passing vehicles results in spending significant costs on continues Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) treatments. Lane closure owing to the implementation of M&R operations incurs enormous costs on road users. The research aimed to calculate, and...

achieving optimal production cycle time for improving manufacturing processes is one of the common problems in production planning. during recent years, different approaches have been developed for solving this problem, but most of them assume that mean quality characteristic is constant over production run length and sets it on customer’s target value. however, the process mean may drift from ...