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...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of joining HMOs (health maintenance organizations) on the inpatient utilization of Medicare beneficiaries. DATA SOURCES We linked enrollment data on Medicare beneficiaries to patient discharge data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) for 1991-1995. DESIGN AND SAMPLE A quasi-experimental design comparing inpatient ...

BACKGROUND There are few published studies on the relationship between occupational lumbar load and facet joint degeneration (FJD). This cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the effect of physical lumbar load on FJD by comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings of firefighters (FFs) and hospital office workers (HOWs). METHODS We randomly sampled 341 male FFs and 80 male HO...

The paper reports the obtained results for the projection and realization of a digitally system aiming to assist the equipment for a regulatory and pre-regulatory tools and holding tools within the flexible fabrication systems (FFS). Moreover, based on the present results, the same methodology can be applied for assisting tools from the point of view of their integrity and to wear compensation ...