The principal themes for the Biomedical Research and the Environment Conference Committee on Environmental Economics in Biomedical Research include the following: healthcare delivery companies and biomedical research organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, need to improve their environmental performance; suppliers of healthcare products will be called upon to support this need; and improv...

an ovERviEW of THE RiSKS PoSED To HEalTHCaRE WoRKERS Cancer is the world’s leading cause of death, claiming the lives of an estimated 7.9 million people in 2007 alone.1 Experts expect these numbers to double before 2030.1 The unsafe handling of hazardous drugs used to treat many forms of cancer has been recognized since the 1970s as a significant health hazard to workers. Studies have shown tha...

Detection of fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) is an important yet difficult problem. In this paper, we describe a system to detect suspicious activities in large healthcare claims datasets. Each healthcare dataset is viewed as a heterogeneous network of patients, doctors, pharmacies, and other entities. These networks can be large, with millions of patients, hundreds of thousands of doctors, and t...

After any therapy, when symptoms improve, healthcare providers (and patients) are tempted to award credit to treatment. Over time, a particular treatment can seem so undeniably helpful that scientific verification of efficacy is judged an inconvenient waste of time and resources. Unfortunately, practitioners' accumulated, day-to-day, informal impressions of diagnostic reliability and clinical e...

BACKGROUND Only 36% of sick Australians report being able to get an appointment on the day they need it, which is poor by international standards. This delay in care may impact on practice team morale, practice profitability and patient care. The Australian Primary Care Collaboratives Program aims to find better ways to provide primary healthcare services to patients through shared learning, pe...