Clinical trial related injury and serious adverse events (SAE) are a major area of concern. In all such scenarios the investigator is responsible for medical care of the trial participant and also ethically bound to report the event to all the stakeholders of the clinical trial. The trial sponsor is responsible for ongoing safety evaluation of the investigational product, reporting and compensa...

Recent events in several countries have underscored the importance of good governance in private occupational pension plans. The present paper uses contract theory to analyze the interplay of residual claims and control rights in private pensions. The residual claimant is the plan sponsor in a defined benefit (DB) plan and the pool of beneficiaries in a defined contribution (DC) plan. The main ...

Developments in network technology have enabled an increasing variety of interorganizational relationships. While the interorganizational systems (IOSs) that support electronic markets or customer/supplier relations have been discussed in the literature, those which support `symbiotic networks' ± those which form horizontal alliances to allow collaboration on the collective production of goods ...

OBJECTIVES To contrast pharmacy benefit management (PBM) companies' measured profitability by using two accounting standards. The first accounting standard is that which, under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), PBMs are currently allowed to employ. The second accounting standard, seemingly more congruent with the PBM business model, treats the PBM as an agent of the plan sponsor....

Financial Disclosure: Dr. Berthold has no conflicts of interest to declare. Dr. Gouni-Berthold has received honoraria for speaking engagements from Pfizer and Eli Lilly. Dr. Böhm has received speakers’ honoraria from AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, MSD Sharp & Dohme, Essex Pharma, Pfizer, Servier and Sanofi-Aventis. He has been on an advisory panel for AstraZeneca, Boeh...

The human has served as a focal point of robotics projects at the University of Utah’s Center for Engineering Design and at its commercial offshoot, Sarcos Research Inc. Anthropomorphic robots have been created to attempt to capture human capabilities and to facilitate teleoperation by similarity of structure and performance. Animatronic figures attempt to create realistic looking and moving hu...

A perfect matching covering of a graph G is a set of perfect matchings of G such that every edge of G is contained in at least one member of it. Berge conjectured that every bridgeless cubic graph admits a perfect matching covering of order at most 5 (we call such a collection of perfect matchings a Berge covering of G). A cubic graph G is called a Kotzig graph if G has a 3-edge-coloring such t...

A novel supersonic beam of ground-state boron atoms [B(2P)] was employed to investigate the reaction of B(2P) with acetylene [C2H2( g+)] at an average collision energy of 16.3 ± 0.4 kJ mol−1 at the most fundamental microscopic level. The crossed molecular beam technique was used to record time of flight spectra at mass to charge ratios of 36 (11BC2H+), 35 (10BC2H+/11BC2+), and 34 (10BC2+) at di...

There is no universally accepted definition of what an incidental finding is [Wolf et al., ] and broadly speaking this could include variants of known and unknown clinical significance, variants linked to highly penetrant, serious, life-threatening conditions, non-paternity or ancestry data. For the purposes of our study, we have adopted a pragmatic distinction between ‘pertinent’ and ‘incident...

UNLABELLED The magnitude of the effect size of an analgesic intervention can be influenced by several factors, including research design. A key design component is the choice of the primary endpoint. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to compare the assay sensitivity of 2 efficacy paradigms: pain intensity (calculated using summed pain intensity difference [SPID]) and pain relief (calculated...