The day is drawing near when each patient can be made into a SuperModel—not a fashion model, but a digital or virtual model (see companion paper Brown, in review). Such representation of a patient can also be termed a patient avatar (The Discipulus Project, 2013). Principles to help guide successful implementation of these SuperModels are addressed in this article, including efficiency and cost...

BACKGROUND Other than the UK, The Netherlands has no formal threshold for cost-per-QALY values defined yet. For example, a cutoff value at €20,000 per QALY is sometimes mentioned in various discussions, however it has no formal status at all. Yet, since 2005, all new innovative do have to go through a cost-effectiveness evaluation though, with the assessment being focused on the methodology rat...

BACKGROUND Although economic evaluation has been widely recognized as a key feature of both health services and educational research, for many years there has been a paucity of such studies relevant to services for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), making the application of economic arguments to the development of services difficult. AIMS The study has two aims, n...

During the past four decades, public trust in governments has continued to diminish due to various administrative, political, socio-cultural, economic, and mass media causes. Focusing on the administrative dimension, this study explores selected administrative factors to the declining of public trust, including public perception of administrative corruption (lack of transparency), inefficiency ...

This paper discusses the application of plant-wide control philosophy to enhance the performance and capacity of the Produced Water Treatment (PWT) in offshore oil & gas production processes. Different from most existing facilityor material-based PWT innovation methods, the objective of this work is to propose a software-based breakthrough PWT innovation solution. This is achieved through integ...

Voluntary eye hospitals committed to serving the community must understand the reality of cost escalation due to inflation, advancements in medical technology and changing expectations of staff and patients. However, these costs are often not matched by the patients’ paying capacity. While increasing income, through increased user fees or donations which are financial options that will be consi...

The selection of the best suppliers is a key issue for many companies. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that the most economical supplier may not be the one that has the lowest purchase price. The cheapest supplier is the one that represents the lowest cost to the company, after being considered various aspects of supplying, such as quality, reliability of deliveries, the history of s...

Cross-protection against non-HPV16/18 types and the emergence of broad spectrum vaccines protecting against multiple HPV types will influence the cost-effectiveness of future screening. To assess this influence we used an individual-based simulation model describing the relation between 14 HPV types and cervical disease, allowing the occurrence of multiple type infections. Screening scenarios f...