BACKGROUND The term managed care encompasses a variety of organizational arrangements between physicians and health plans. At one extreme, physicians are plan employees; at the other, physicians have contracts with multiple plans. How these arrangements affect physicians' satisfaction with managed care is not well known. OBJECTIVE To explore the effect of organizational structure on physician...

The multiple state transition interface sampling (TIS) framework in principle allows the simulation of a large network of complex rare event transitions, but in practice suffers from convergence problems. To improve convergence, we combine multiple state TIS [J. Rogal and P. G. Bolhuis, J. Chem. Phys. 129, 224107 (2008)] with replica exchange TIS [T. S. van Erp, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 268301 (200...

In this paper, available standard procedures for the evaluation of failure probabilities are compared and critically discussed in view of their applications in high dimensions, multiple failure domains and implicit performance function (FE-analyses). Approximate FORM/SORM and Importance Sampling are compared with Line Sampling. It is shown that FORM lacks robustness in high dimensions and SORM ...

Enabling robots to accomplish sophisticated tasks requires enhancing their capability to plan at multiple levels of discrete and continuous abstractions. Toward this goal, the proposed approach couples the ability of sampling-based motion planning to handle the complexity arising from high-dimensional robotic systems, nonlinear dynamics, and collision avoidance with the ability of discrete plan...

With ever-increasing display resolution for wide field-of-view displays—such as head-mounted displays or 8k projectors—shading has become the major computational cost in rasterization. To reduce computational effort, we propose an algorithm that only shades visible features of the image while cost-effectively interpolating the remaining features without affecting perceived quality. In contrast ...

Acceptance sampling had become an essential practical tool for quality assurance application, closely related with incoming inspection. Acceptance sampling plans provide the decision rule for product acceptance to meet the preset product quality required by the vendor and the buyer. As today’s modern paradigm of quality improvement, reduction of variance from the target value is the guiding pri...

BACKGROUND & AIMS Hepatitis C (HCV) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in people who live with HIV. In many countries, access to direct acting antiviral agents to treat HCV is restricted to individuals with advanced liver disease (METAVIR stage F3 or F4). Our goal was to estimate the long term impact of deferring HCV treatment for men who have sex with men (MSM) who are coinfected wi...