This paper proposes a real-time 3D feature extraction hardware algorithm with feature point matching capability between neighboring frames, which realizes 3D tracking of moving objects. This hardware algorithm is based on a 3D voting method. Both the 3D voting and tlie featiire point matching arc directly carried out through highly parallel processing by content addressable memory (CAM) i11 rea...

State governments contract with health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to coordinate medical care for nearly 20 million Medicaid recipients. Identifying the causal effect of HMO enrollment on government spending and health care quality is difficult if, as is often the case, recipients have the option to enroll in a plan. To estimate the average effect of HMO enrollment, this paper exploits cou...

There has been much debate among economists about whether nursing home quality is a public good across Medicaid and private-pay patients within a common facility. However, there has been only limited empirical work addressing this issue. Using a unique individual level panel of residents of nursing homes from seven states, we exploit both withinfacility and within-patient variation in payer sou...

Recent empirical studies point to the need for a model of bilateral market power between health plans and provider organizations. We develop such a model and use it to analyze the impact on cost and access of alternative contractual relationships between plans and providers. The plans differentiate themselves through distinct, albeit overlapping, provider networks of specialized, complementary ...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals with regard to clinical quality and waiting time for an important surgical procedure. We find substanti...

Most physicians today treat a variety of patients within their practices where a variety of insurance arrangements co-exist. In this paper, we propose several theoretical explanations for physician treatment patterns when the patient population is heterogeneous at the practice level. Data from the 1993-1996 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) are used to test how practice-level mana...

We analyse the fi nancial performance of small German hospitals based on balance sheet data of about 1,000 hospitals in 2007. Measures of fi nancial performance are the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) and the probability of default (PD). We fi nd that, on average, small hospitals have more fi nancial diffi culties than large ones. However, there is conside...

Empirical evidence from U.S. studies suggests that, on average, female physicians earn less than their male counterparts. This gap in earnings does not disappear when individual and market characteristics are controlled for. This paper investigates whether a gender earnings difference can also be observed in a health care system predominantly financed by public insurance companies. Using a uniq...

Direct-to-consumer drug advertising has recently become an important and controversial component of drug marketing. In this paper we examine one of the claimed benefits of drug advertising: encouraging the undiagnosed to seek out medical treatment. Using detailed person-level panel data on more than 30,000 individuals from the Medical Care Expenditure Panel Survey, we measure how advertising af...

This study empirically examines the effect of hospital competition on prescribing behaviors of oral hypoglycemic agents (OHAs) for ambulatory care in a market setting where hospitals are classified into three levels according to the Taiwanese accreditation system. Without distinguishing the types of market structures and hospital levels, there might be no significant relationship between hospit...