Our experiences studying exemplar primary care practices, and our work assisting other practices to become more patient centered, led to a formulation of the essential elements of primary care, which we call the 10 building blocks of high-performing primary care. The building blocks include 4 foundational elements-engaged leadership, data-driven improvement, empanelment, and team-based care-tha...

BACKGROUND Chronic mid back and upper back pain caused by thoracic facet joints has been reported in 34% to 48% of the patients based on the responses to controlled diagnostic blocks. Systematic reviews have established moderate evidence for controlled comparative local anesthetic blocks of thoracic facet joints in the diagnosis of mid back and upper back pain, moderate evidence for therapeutic...

Using an audit data anonymization system as an example, we show how the APES approach for basic anonymity building blocks can be used to evaluate the design of a given anonymity system. As a side-product we obtain indications of the incompleteness of the APES building blocks approach. 1 APES: Anonymity and Privacy in Electronic Services In the APES project (Anonymity and Privacy in Electronic S...

The use of non-human primates provides an excellent translational model for our understanding of developmental and aging processes in humans(1-6). In addition, the use of non-human primates has recently afforded the opportunity to naturally model complex psychiatric disorders such as alcohol abuse(7). Here we describe a technique for blocking the brain in the coronal plane of the vervet monkey ...

We prove NP-hardness of a wide class of pushing-block puzzles similar to the classic Sokoban, generalizing several previous results [5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 17]. The puzzles consist of unit square blocks on an integer lattice; all blocks are movable. The robot may move horizontally and vertically in order to reach a specified goal position. The puzzle variants differ in the number of blocks that the r...

Liquid laboratory waste containing osmic acid and cacodylic acid was mixed with potter's clay or hydraulic cement. The clay-waste product was kneaded into blocks and baked in a klin (1,200-1,400 degrees C). The cement-waste product was allowed to harden into concrete blocks. Some of the baked clay blocks and concrete blocks were ground, and immersed in 1 N NaOH or 10% HCI solutions for 3-6 mont...

This paper presents a breakthrough decomposition theorem on routing topology and its applications in the designing of universal switch blocks. A switch block of k sides and W terminals on each side is said to be universal (a (k, W )-USB) if it is routable for every set of 2-pin nets with channel density at most W . The optimum USB design problem is to design a (k, W )-USB with the minimum numbe...

By using an unsupervised cluster analyzer, we have identified a local structural alphabet composed of 16 folding patterns of five consecutive C(alpha) ("protein blocks"). The dependence that exists between successive blocks is explicitly taken into account. A Bayesian approach based on the relation protein block-amino acid propensity is used for prediction and leads to a success rate close to 3...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Cervical transforaminal blocks are frequently performed to treat cervical radicular pain. These blocks are performed mostly under fluoroscopy, but a CT-guided technique has also been described. The aim of this study was to review the results of CT-guided CSNRB by using a dorsal approach, to describe the contrast patterns achieved with this injection technique, and to esti...