BACKGROUND Overseeing the quality of community-based, home-care services is a subject of concern in most jurisdictions confronted with population aging and the rise of chronic conditions. Although various quality management strategies have been used in different health care settings, continuous quality improvement (CQI) is still in the early stages of development among home-care service provide...

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers hardware resources (computing power, storage and network) as a service to its customers. The customers order these resources in the form of a lease. Aim of any service provider is to make a leasing plan to maximize the number of accepted leases. Opennebula is popular open source toolkit for building IaaS cloud. Opennebula has its own lease manager and i...

Many salient profit incentives that health care providers face stem from government policies. We investigate hospital response to the 340B Drug Discount Program, a federal policy that substantially increases profitability of drug administration for about 45% of hospitals by entitling them to discounts of between 20% and 50% on drugs. Our primary empirical strategy is a fuzzy regression disconti...

Inappropriate incentives as part of China's fee-for-service payment system have resulted in rapid cost increase, inefficiencies, poor quality, unaffordable health care, and an erosion of medical ethics. To reverse these outcomes, a strategy of experimentation to realign incentives for providers with the social goals of improvement in quality and efficiency has been initiated in China. This Revi...

With the growth in digital libraries and standardization of protocols for metadata sharing, it is becoming feasible to build federated discovery services which aggregate metadata from different digital libraries (data providers) and provide a unified search interface to users. One of the obstacles that keep data providers, especially the commercial ones, from joining the federation is the lack ...

Software as a Service (SaaS) offers reliable access to software applications to the end users over the Internet without direct investment in infrastructure and software. SaaS providers utilize resources of internal data centres or rent resources from a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider in order to serve their customers. Internal hosting can ample cost of administration and main...

This paper identifies factors that explain the large variability in the price of voluntary carbon offsets. We estimate hedonic price functions using a variety of providerand project-level characteristics as explanatory variables. We find that providers located in Europe sell offsets at prices that are approximately 30% higher than providers located in either North America or Australasia. Contra...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Three countries, Bangladesh, India and Nepal, set out to eliminate kala-azar by 2015. This study was aimed to document the knowledge and practices in kala-azar case management of public and private health providers in these three countries. METHODS A health care provider survey was conducted in 2007 at 4 study sites, viz., Muzaffarpur and Vaishali districts in India, M...