Objective To measure therapeutic inertia by characterizing prescription patterns using secondary data obtained from the nationwide diabetes mellitus pay-for-performance (DM-P4P) programme in Taiwan. Methods Using reimbursement claims from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database, a nationwide retrospective cohort study was undertaken of patients with diabetes mellitus who participat...

In this paper we introduce a framework for privacypreserving distributed computation that is practical for many real-world applications. The framework is called Peers for Privacy (P4P) and features a novel heterogeneous architecture and a number of efficient tools for performing private computation and ensuring security at large scale. It maintains the following properties: (1) Provably strong ...

T he US health care system falls far short of providing care consistent with national standards of care and available knowledge. There continue to be wide variations in how care is provided, and a host of studies and reports point to substantial deficits in the quality of care being delivered.1–3 The study by McGlynn and colleagues4 that examined the delivery of care in 12 communities across th...

The healthcare quality movement can trace its origins back to the man considered to be the architect of healthcare quality, Avedis Donabedian (1919–2000), who did his major work on defining quality in healthcare from the 1960s through 1985, and who published three seminal volumes, entitled Explorations in Healthcare Quality and Monitoring between 1980 and 1985 (21–23). Donabedian first classifi...

Many countries have introduced pay-for-performance (P4P) Introduction. models to encourage health providers and institutions to provide good quality of care. In 2013, the National Health Security Office of Thailand introduced P4P, based on the UK Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), as a mandatory programme for primary care providers. This study aims to review the first year of the Thai QOF po...

This paper introduces a new framework for privacy preserving computation to the granular computing community. The framework is called P4P (Peers for Privacy) and features a unique architecture and practical protocols for user data validation and vector addition-based computation. It turned out that many non-trivial and non-linear computations can be done using an iterative algorithm with vector...

BACKGROUND Around ten percent of the population have been reported as having Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), which is associated with increased cardiovascular mortality. Few previous studies have ascertained the chronicity of CKD. In the UK, a payment for performance (P4P) initiative incentivizes CKD (stages 3-5) recognition and management in primary care, but the impact of this has not been asse...