BACKGROUND As the U.S. healthcare payment system shifts from volume to value, identifying care approaches that improve outcomes while lowering costs are essential. We sought to understand the utility of home infusion versus medical-setting infusion as a mechanism to affect the three-part aim: better care, better health outcomes, and lower costs. STUDY DESIGN Systematic review. METHODS We se...

Natural interactions between water, soil, atmosphere, plants and microorganisms include physical, chemical and biological processes with decontaminating capacities. Natural or energy-saving wastewater treatment systems utilize these processes and thereby enable a sustainable management in the field of wastewater treatment, offering low investment and operation costs, little or no energy consump...

With an incidence of 68 new cases per 100,000 people per year, an estimated total number of up to 350,000 new non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cases are diagnosed each year in the European Union. Up to 10% of NSCLC patients are eligible for therapy with novel ALK (anaplastic lymphoma kinase) inhibitors, as they have been diagnosed with a mutation in the gene coding for ALK. The ALK inhibitor ...

Signcryption is a new paradigm in public key cryptography. A remarkable property of a signcryption scheme is that it fulfills both the functions of public key encryption and digital signature, with a cost significantly smaller than that required by signature-then-encryption. The purposes of this paper are to demonstrate how to specify signcryption schemes on elliptic curves over finite fields, ...

BACKGROUND While the benefits of evidence-based counseling to large numbers of women and physicians are intuitively evident, there is an urgent need to document that teratology counseling, in addition to improving the quality of life of women and families, also leads to cost saving. The objective of the present study was to calculate the cost effectiveness of the Motherisk Program, a large tera...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of treatment with intramuscular (IM) methotrexate compared with fallopian tube-sparing laparoscopy for small unruptured ectopic pregnancy. METHODS A decision-analytic model accounting for varying resolution rates, complication rates, and cost estimates was built to compare the use of methotrexate with laparoscopy. Meta-analysis results of studies i...

PURPOSE To estimate the economic impact of a TegadermTM chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) gel dressing compared with a standard intravenous (i.v.) dressing (defined as non-antimicrobial transparent film dressing), used for insertion site care of short-term central venous and arterial catheters (intravascular catheters) in adult critical care patients using a cost-consequence model populated with da...

Recent Phase 2b dengue vaccine trials have demonstrated the safety of the vaccine and estimated the vaccine efficacy with further trials underway. In anticipation of vaccine roll-out, cost-effectiveness analysis of potential vaccination policies that quantify the dynamics of disease transmission are fundamental to the optimal allocation of available doses. We developed a dengue transmission and...

Background We evaluated the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions targeting hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV infections among people who inject drugs (PWID) in Eastern Europe/Central Asia. We specifically considered the needle-syringe program (NSP), opioid substitution therapy (OST), HCV and HIV diagnosis, antiretroviral therapy (ART), and/or new HCV treatment (direct acting anti...

BACKGROUND The International Maternal, Pediatric, and Adolescent Clinical Trials P1060 trial demonstrated superior outcomes for HIV-infected children less than 3 years old initiating antiretroviral therapy (ART) with lopinavir/ritonavir compared to nevirapine, but lopinavir/ritonavir is four-fold costlier. DESIGN/METHODS We used the Cost-Effectiveness of Preventing AIDS Complications (CEPAC)-...