the water and waste-water industry, as an infrastructure industry, has wide interactions with the public by having more than 20 million subscribers (27 million units). one of these interactions is the collection of debt considering the nature of the obligation sales and service rendered. collection of debt and the costs imposed as a result of the qualitative and quantitative services offered to...

one-third of this increase, however, represented a shift from the money payment to the vendor payment. Although vendor payments for medical care for the four categories combined went up in all but six of the 42 States that made such payments in one or more of these programs, almost three-fourths of the total increase occurred in eight States.5 For the country as a whole, the increase in vendor ...

he use of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems for the settlement of large-value payments offers considerable advantages, the principal one being the elimination of the credit risk that can arise between participants in deferred net settlement systems. However, in comparison with deferred net settlement systems, RTGS systems require relatively large amounts of liquidity to support payment ...

Commercial aviation in-flight emergencies are relatively common, so it is likely that a doctor travelling frequently by air will receive a call for help at some stage in their career. These events are stressful, even for experienced physicians. The present paper reviews what is known about the incidence and types of in-flight emergencies that are likely to be encountered, the international regu...

BACKGROUND The independent oversight of clinical trials, which is recommended by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Guidelines for Good Clinical Practice, is typically provided by an independent advisory Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) and an independent executive committee, to whom the DMC makes recommendations. The detailed roles and function of this executive committee, known as the Trial St...

This study examines how wellness scores generated from the Health Risk Appraisal are associated with prospective medical claims costs, controlling for age, gender, and disease status. The study was conducted among 19,861 active employees who participated in the Health Risk Appraisal and selected indemnity or PPO medical plans from 1996 to 1998. A multiple regression model based on group average...

Medical negligence has been the subject of much public debate in recent decades. Although the steep increase in the frequency and size of claims against doctors at the end of the last century appears to have plateaued, in Australia at least, medical indemnity costs and consequences are still a matter of concern for doctors, medical defence organisations and governments in most developed countri...

Informed consent (IC), a fundamental principle of ethics in medical research, is recognized as a vital component of HIV vaccine trials. There are different notions of IC, some legally based and others based on ethics. It is argued that, though legal indemnity is necessary, vaccine trials should be founded on fully ethical considerations. Various contentious aspects of IC are examined, especiall...

BACKGROUND The U.S. Physician Payments Sunshine Act mandates the reporting of payments or items of value received by physicians from drug, medical device, and biological agent manufacturers. The impact of these payments on physician prescribing has not been examined at large scale. METHODS We linked public Medicare Part D prescribing data and Sunshine Act data for 2013. Physician payments wer...