BACKGROUND Hospital volume has been widely embraced as a proxy measure for hospital quality; little attention has been focused on an alternative quality measure-hospital specialization. Even though specialization occurs on a continuum, previous studies have only focused on a small number of highly specialized hospitals (single-specialty hospitals). Studies on the broad relationship between hosp...

BACKGROUND Hospitals with primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) capability may choose to predominately offer PPCI to their patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), or they may selectively offer PPCI or fibrinolytic therapy based on patient and hospital-level factors. Whether a greater level of hospital specialization with PPCI is associated with better quali...

BACKGROUND There is a critical shortage of healthcare workers in sub-Saharan Africa, and Malawi has one of the lowest physician densities in the region. One of the reasons for this shortage is inadequate retention of medical school graduates, partly due to the desire for specialization training. The University of Malawi College of Medicine has developed specialty training programs, but medical ...

Many animals show some degree of individual specialization in foraging strategies and diet. This has profound ecological and evolutionary implications. For example, populations containing diverse individual foraging strategies will respond in different ways to changes in the environment, thus affecting the capacity of the populations to adapt to environmental changes and to diversify. However, ...

It is often assumed that ecological specialization represents an evolutionary "dead-end" that limits further evolution. Maximum-likelihood (ML) analyses on phylogenies for 15 groups of phytophagous insects revealed that high transition rates both to and from specialization occurred, but that the mean ratio of rates was significantly biased toward a higher rate to specialization. Here we explore...

II. JUDICIAL SPECIALIZATION: A BACKGROUND .............................. 397 A. The Theoretical Context for Judicial Specialization ............... 397 B. Typologies of Judicial Specialization ...................................... 399 C. Arguments for and Against Specialized Courts ....................... 400 1. Development of Judicial Human Capital .............................. 401 2. Creati...

We explore the determinants of research specialization and examine the e ects of technology di usion and trade on the incentives for innovation. To some extent, di usion substitutes for trade. If trade costs are low relative to di erences in comparative advantage in doing research, rapid di usion implies specialization in research activity. Country size has an ambiguous e ect on specialization ...

The concept of movable evidence masses that flow from supersets to subsets as specified by experts represents a suitable framework for reasoning under uncertainty. The mass flow is controlled by specialization matrices. New evidence is integrated into the frame of discernment by conditioning or revision (Dempster's rule of conditioning), for which special specialization matrices exist. Even som...

Within the imperative programming paradigm, program slicing has been widely used as a basis to solve many software engineering problems, like debugging, testing, differencing, specialization, and merging. In this work, we present a lightweight approach to program specialization of lazy functional logic programs which is based on dynamic slicing. The kind of specialization performed by our appro...

In this paper we give a proof of the fact, that the motivic Hodge-Chern class transformation MHCy and Hirzebruch class transformation MHTy∗ for mixed Hodge modules and strictly specializable filtered D-modules commute with specialization in the algebraic and in a suitable complex analytic context. Here specialization in the Hodgeand D-module context means the corresponding nearby cycles defined...