Strong interest by Congress in a Medicare prospective payment system for skilled nursing facilities (SNF's) resulted in a major study by the Health Care Financing Administration on the Medicare SNF benefit. This article highlights findings from that study, which addressed the following: the Medicare SNF benefit, utilization and expenditures, the Medicare SNF industry, problems with the current ...

In this paper, we describe benchmarking efforts for production control approaches applied to complex manufacturing systems. Complex manufacturing systems are characterized by a large number of products, an over time changing product mix, sequence-dependent set-up times, unrelated parallel machines, a mix of different process types and internal and external disturbances. In order to ensure compa...

Over the past decade, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) focused research efforts on improving hot mix asphalt concrete (HMAC) mix design to preclude rutting in the early life of pavements. However, these rut-resistant stiff mixtures may be susceptible to long-term fatigue cracking due to oxidative aging. This project completed initial development of an HMAC mixture fatigue design a...

Documentation of the care delivered to hospitalized patients is a ubiquitous and important aspect of medical care. The majority of references to documentation and coding are based on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS). We educated the members of a clinical care team in a single depar...

Web-based information systems provide to their users the ability to interleave querying and browsing during their information discovery efforts. The MIX system provides an API called QDOM (Querible Document Object Model) that supports the interleaved querying and browsing of virtual XML views, specified in an XQuery-like language. QDOM is based on the DOM standard. It allows the client applicat...

The Jakobsson hybrid Mix-net proposed by Jakobsson and Juels, is a very practical and efficient scheme for long input messages. But this hybrid Mix-net does not have public verifiable property. In this paper a new attack to the Jakobsson hybrid Mix-net is introduced. This attack breaks the robustness of the hybrid Mix-net scheme, given that the corrupted first mix server and one of the senders ...

In this paper, we will discuss our efforts to create the next generation of semiconductor factory simulation tools, which we call complete response-surface mapping (cRSM). More specifically, we will describe the basic research and software development necessary to produce the capability to provide simulation results on demand for cycle-time measures as a function of throughput and product mix.

Purchase timing of households is usually modeled at the category level. Marketing efforts are however only available at the brand level. Hence, to describe category-level interpurchase times using marketing efforts one has to construct a category-level measure of marketing efforts from the marketing mix of individual brands. In this paper we discuss two standard approaches suggested in the lite...

introduction:the prevalence of atopic diseases has increased in recent decades dramatically. the most common aeroallergens in northeastern iran have not been fully defined. define the most common aeroallergens in allergic patients based on the skin prick test (spt) was aimed in this investigation.materials and methods:this cross-sectional study enrolled 1,006 allergic patients (aged 1–86 years)...