Poor health status, rapidly escalating health care costs, and seemingly little association between investments in health care and health outcomes have prompted a call for a "pay-for-performance" system to improve population health. We suggest that both health plans and clinical service providers measure and report the rates of 5 behaviors: 1) smoking, 2) physical activity, 3) excessive drinking...

systems thinking is not a new concept to health system strengthening; however, one question remains unanswered: how policy-makers, system designers and consultants with a system thinking philosophy should act (have acted) as potential change agents in actually gaining opportunities to introduce systems thinking? development of comprehensive multi-year plans (cmyps) for immunization system is on...

conclusions this study aims to shed light on different methods of economic evaluations in order to provoke healthcare professionals and researchers to think about different ways in which economic evaluations might be of value to their practices. results it is likely that, to date, little attention has been paid to developing a better conceptual understanding of economic evaluations in decision-...

Recent articles have reported a large and growing financial crisis associated with retiree health plans offered by state and local governments, and have expressed alarm over their impact on the financial status of these governmental units (Goldman Sachs 2007; David Zion and Amit Varshney 2007). The concern about the unfunded liabilities of retiree health plans follows from a change in the publi...

May 17, 2009 Health plans are increasingly shifting costs to plan members to share the burden of rising health care costs. A survey of the published literature and conference presentations was conducted to examine the contributors and burden of out-of-pocket costs (OPCs) for persons with diagnosed cancer. This review indicates that the OPCs for cancer patients covered by health plans are increa...

By almost any measure, the Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D) is a resounding success. Twenty-five million Medicare beneficiaries enjoyed guaranteed access and choice of a drug benefit in 2008.1 Based on the bids submitted by Part D plans for 2009, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) estimates that the average monthly premium for standard Part D coverage will be $28, a...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is constructing a performance evaluation model for service-oriented catering supply chain. Design/methodology/approach: With the research on the current situation of catering industry, this paper summarized the characters of the catering supply chain, and then presents the service-oriented catering supply chain model based on the platform of logistics and informat...

Formal asymptotic expansions have long been used to study the singularly perturbed Allen-Cahn type equations and reaction-diffusion systems, including in particular the FitzHugh-Nagumo system. Despite their successful role, it has been largely unclear whether or not such expansions really represent the actual profile of solutions with rather general initial data. By combining our earlier result...

We present an alternative derivation of the dynamical density functional theory for the one-body density profile of a classical fluid developed by Marconi and Tarazona [J. Chem. Phys. 110, 8032 (1999)]. Our derivation elucidates further some of the physical assumptions inherent in the theory and shows that it is not restricted to fluids composed of particles interacting solely via pair potentia...

Article history: Received 19 June 2013 Received in revised form 9 August 2013 Accepted 12 August 2013 Available online 14 September 2013