Background: Capitation payment is the best-known strategy for paying providers in primary health care. Since health care needs and personal characteristics play an essential role in health care utilization and resource spending, there is a growing tendency on risk adjustment models among health researchers.  The objective of this systematic review was to examine the weights used for risk adjust...

Evaluation of suppliers basing on the manufacturing strategy is the prime function of the purchasing department of the organization in today’s highly competitive business environment. Cost is the market winner in lean manufacturing strategy, thus the organizations focus on eliminating waste and achieve low cost. Service level can be considered as market winner in agile manufacturing strategy an...

This study empirically investigated how small and medium-sized Chinese apparel enterprises (SME) formed their strategy as a response to the characteristics of business environment in order to achieve competitive business performance. An environment-strategy-performance model was proposed and tested. Using primary data gathered by a questionnaire survey of the Chinese apparel industry, factor an...

High quality graphenes were prepared from low-cost expandable graphite via a facile hydrazine hydrate or concentrated ammonia-assisted quenching strategy.

We applied optimal control theory to an SI epidemic model to identify optimal culling strategies for diseases management in wildlife. We focused on different forms of the objective function, including linear control, quadratic control, and control with limited amount of resources. Moreover, we identified optimal solutions under different assumptions on disease-free host dynamics, namely: self-r...

In industry development strategy of electric vehicles, apart from concerns on the development of electric vehicles, we also need to consider the issue of charging facilities construction. Firstly, through analysis, this paper discusses the importance of AC charging points for electric vehicle development. By studying existing AC charging points on the market, it presents a low-cost smart AC cha...

Following Miles and Snow’s Business Strategy (BS) topology, we find that banks impose relatively higher loan spreads for the firms follow an Innovation-Oriented Strategy (IOBS). We further document IOBS is positively associated with corporate risk measures such as variances in equity returns on assets. Overall, our findings suggest charge a cost of debt anticipation borrowers’ payback riskin...

This paper proposes a pervasive retail architecture based on a free human gaze estimation system. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the possibility to automatically understand the behavior of the persons looking at a shop window: this is done by a gaze estimation technique that uses a RGB-D device in order to extract head pose information from which a fast geometric technique then eva...

OBJECTIVE To facilitate the choice of the best visceral leishmaniasis (VL) treatment strategy for first-line health services in (VL)-endemic areas, we compared in a formal decision analysis the cost and the cost-effectiveness of the different available options. METHODS We selected four drug regimens for VL on the basis of frequency of use, feasibility and reported efficacy studies. The point ...