OBJECTIVE To analyze variability in urologists' Medicare utilization and payment and estimate potential cost savings of standardized service utilization using information from the recently released Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier Public Use File (PUF) and to highlight potential limitations of PUF analysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS The Centers for Medi...

The Genetic Resource Center (GRC) is a centralized process for requesting genetic testing that is not available within the province (Alberta, Canada). In order to assess potential cost savings associated with this process, all applications received by the GRC in 2010 were reviewed, and cost savings were recorded for statistical analysis. Seven areas of cost savings were identified: (i) negotiat...

Buildings are among the largest consumers of energy. Part of the energy is wasted due to the habits of users and equipment conditions. A solution to this problem is efficient energy usage. To this end, an energy audit can be conducted to assess the energy efficiency. This study aims to analyze the energy usage of a primary school and identify the potential energy reductions and cost savings. A ...

BACKGROUND Shortened treatment regimens for tuberculosis are under development to improve treatment outcomes and reduce costs. We estimated potential savings from a societal perspective in Brazil following the introduction of a hypothetical four-month regimen for tuberculosis treatment. METHODS Data were gathered in ten randomly selected health facilities in Rio de Janeiro. Health service cos...

Prevention of unhealthy lifestyles has sometimes been promoted as simultaneously reducing costs and improving public health but this will unlikely prove to be true. Additional medical costs in life years gained due to treatment of unrelated diseases may offset possible savings in related diseases, but are often ignored both in health promotion policies and in economic evaluations of life-prolon...

In many supply chains consumption of indirect materials, sold by a supplier to a customer for use in her production process, can be reduced by efforts exerted by either party. Since traditional supply contracts provide no incentive for the supplier to exert such effort, shared-savings contracts have been proposed as a way to improve incentives in the channel, leading to more efficient effort ch...

An array of polymer grid triodes connected by a common grid functions as a "plastic retina," providing local contrast gain control for image enhancement. This simple device, made from layers of conducting polymers, functions as an active resistive network that performs center-surround filtering. The polymer grid triode array with common grid is a continuous analog of the discrete approach of Me...