OBJECTIVE Before cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) can fulfill its promise as a tool to guide health care allocation decisions, the method of incorporating societal values into CEA may need to be improved. DESIGN The study design was a declarative exposition of potential fallacies in the theoretical underpinnings of CEA. Two values held by many people-preferences for giving priority to severe...

As currently practiced, value-added assessment relies on a strong assumption about the scales used to measure student achievement, namely that these are interval scales, with equal-sized gains at all points on the scale representing the same increment of learning. Many of the metrics in which test results are expressed do not have this property (e.g., percentile ranks, normal curve equivalents)...

Valueinhealthcare,thebalancebetweenoutcomesthat mattertopatientsandthecostsrequiredtoachievethem, isbeing increasinglyrecognizedasapathtohealthcarereform.TheDepartmentofHealth andHumanServices recentlyannouncedits intentiontotie50%oftraditionalfeefor-service payments,made by the Centers forMedicare andMedicaid Services (CMS), to value or quality through alternativepaymentmodels(APM), includinga...

Commentary V alue judgments lurk beneath the surface in any study of health inequalities; analysts ought to understand them, make them explicit, and present results transparently to poli-cymakers so that they, rather than analysts, decide which set of value judgments should be invoked. that is the key message of the paper " Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Inequality measurements " 1 Kjellsson et ...

-Glutamyltransferase (GGT) is a microsomal enzyme that is widely distributed in human tissues involved in secretory and absorptive processes, particularly the bile canaliculi. Serum GGT is elevated in liver diseases affecting the biliary system, such as extrahepatic biliary atresia, sclerosing cholangitis and progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis (PFIC) type 3. Conversely, two other sub...

The basic problem in poverty measurement is how to weigh the income of different groups. This is a normative problem on which people differ in opinion, and hence we should seek a way of dealing with the issue that takes into account this plurality. In the paper, we suggest an approach to poverty measurement which avoids incorporating any particular normative position on how to weigh the interes...

the gold standard to assess jaundice in neonates is the serum bilirubin measurement. blood sampling for the determination of total serum bilirubin (tsb) is painful for newborns and stressful for parents. the bilicheck®, a new transcutaneous bilirubinometer, is considered as a more accurate measurement of bilirubin compared to the previous bilirubinometers courtesy of its advanced technology. th...

Dividing Wall Column(DWC) offers the large potential for operating and capital cost saving in compared with conventional distillation sequence. In the studied DWC in this study, the aid of Vmin diagrams, it is shown that without a suitable value for vapor split fraction bellow the dividing wall in different operating conditions, the energy requirement increases from optimal value and it wil...