The Health Care Financing Administration is in the process of designing a competitive bidding model for the purchase of outpatient clinical laboratory services. One segment of this process involves the development of a relative value scale (RVS). The RVS could be used as part of the bidding process and as the basis of payment. The RVS could also be used as the basis of a national fee schedule, ...

The American Society of Internal Medicine (ASIM) appreciates the opportunity to share our perspectives on HCFA’s approach to developing resource-based practice expenses (RBPEs). We understand that HCFA is particularly interested in our views on how indirect practice expense relative value units (RVUs) should be developed. Given the fact that HCFA has proposed that the indirect practice expense ...

L ean thinking has been successfully employed beyond manufacturing in product design and development. This has led to an increasing interest to utilize it in software engineering (SE). The thesis advances this goal by identifying the key practice of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) that can facilitate organizations to adopt Lean for software development. Two major shortcomings of VSM when applying it...

The increased availability of a wide range of sensing technologies over the last few decades has resulted in an equivalent increased need for reliable information fusion methods in machine learning applications. While existing theories such as the Dempster-Shafer theory and the possibility theory have been used for several years now, they do not provide guarantees of error calibration in inform...

We show for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that, in a coherent communication system that employs a phase-shift-keying signal and Raman amplification, besides the pump relative intensity noise (RIN) transfer to the amplitude, the signal's phase will also be affected by pump RIN through the pump-signal cross-phase modulation. Although the average pump power induced linear phase cha...

To understand the Medicare compensation system for physician services, it is necessary to understand how the relative values of medical services are translated into fee schedule payment amounts. Basically, the relative value of a procedure multiplied by the number of dollars per Relative Value Unit (RVU) is the fee paid by Medicare for the procedure (RVUW physician work, RVUPE practice expense,...

Motivation: Assessing the enrichment of biological pathways is a critical problem in systems biology, which has received much attention in recent years. However, available methods often make simplifying assumptions about correlations among components of pathways, and/or rely on appropriate choices of input parameters and sizes of gene sets. In addition, current methods often focus on analysis o...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) uses the resource-based relative value scale to pay physicians and other practitioners for professional services. The work values measure the relative levels of professional time and intensity (physical effort, skills, and stress) associated with providing services. CMS asked RAND to develop a model to validate the work values using external da...

This paper presents a new approach for determining the effective control signals for damping of oscillations by performance comparison of Unified Power Flow Controller in coordination with Power Oscillation Damping Controller and Power System Stabilizer. For the analysis Modified Phllips-Heffron Model of Single Machine Infinite Bus system is established with Unified Power Flow Controller. Impac...