Accountable care organizations (ACOs) have attracted interest from many policy makers and clinical leaders because of their potential to improve the quality of care and reduce costs. Federal ACO programs for Medicare beneficiaries are now up and running, but little information is available about the baseline characteristics of early entrants. In this descriptive study we present data on the str...

A hybrid population based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm PFold-P-ACO for protein folding in the HP model is proposed in this paper. This is the first population based ACO algorithm in the bioinformatics. It is shown experimentally that the algorithms achieves on nearly all test sequences at least comparable results to other state of the art algorithms. Compared to the state of the art ...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic approach to tackle hard combinatorial optimization problems. The basic component of ACO is a probabilistic solution construction mechanism. Due to its constructive nature, ACO can be regarded as a tree search method. Based on this observation, we hybridize the solution construction mechanism of ACO with beam search, which is a well-known tree sea...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the impact of joining an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) on primary care provider organization's costs. The purpose of this study was to determine whether joining an ACO is associated with an increase in a Rural Health Clinic's (RHC's) cost per visit. METHODS The analyses focused on cost per visit in 2012 and 2013 for RHCs that joined an ACO in 2012 and co...

This paper is concerned with application and evaluation of ant colony optimization (ACO) method to practical structural optimization problems. In particular, a size optimum design of pin-jointed truss structures is considered with ACO such that the members are chosen from ready sections for minimum weight design. The application of the algorithm is demonstrated using two design examples with pr...

OBJECTIVE Early recognition of an acute coronary occlusion (ACO) improves clinical outcomes. Soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFLT1) is an endothelium-derived protein induced by hypoxia. We tested whether sFLT1 levels are elevated in ACO. METHODS AND RESULTS Serum sFLT1 levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in patients with ST-segment elevations and angiographically con...

BACKGROUND The term Asthma and COPD Overlap (ACO) describes a condition where asthma and COPD overlap. We aimed to investigate associations between ACO and insomnia and respiratory symptoms, and to investigate the prevalence of ACO and the characteristics of subjects with ACO in two Northern European population studies. METHODS The study comprised 25 429 subjects aged ≥ 40 years who participa...

Swarm intelligence is the technological modeling of behaviors of social insects, such as the ant or the honeybee. Although each element comprising swarm intelligence is simple, high grade intelligence emerges when the elements gather to form a swarm. Ant Colony Optimization (Dorigo, M, et al., 1997), which is called ACO, is one of the swarm intelligence and has been attracting much attention re...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic that has been applied to a diverse set of optimization problems. Problems formulated using ACO have the beneficial quality that solutions are generally constructed making it possible to incorporate constraints during the construction process. Recently, problems in the telecommunications domain have utilized ACO heuristics for routing and fault l...

OBJECTIVE Analyze statistical risks facing CMS and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) under the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). METHODS We calculate the probability that shared savings formulas lead to inappropriate payment, payment denial, and/or financial penalties, assuming that ACOs generate real savings in Medicare spending ranging from 0-10%. We also calculate expected paymen...