Laypersons ("consumers") often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap. However, despite the recent research on mismatches between consumer and professional lan...

The causes and ramifications of the rise in the consumer debt burden over time have been subject to much debate. This paper first offers a brief overview and analysis of the key economic variables used to evaluate consumer debt levels. The principal focus of the paper, however, is a broad review of the literature on the topic of consumer debt to provide a framework for how to assess recent cred...

The Kaplan-Meier (KM) method is used to analyze 'time-to-event' data. The outcome in KM analysis often includes all-cause mortality, but could also include other outcomes such as the occurrence of a cardiovascular event. The purpose of this article is to explain the basic concepts of the KM method, to provide some guidance regarding the presentation of the KM results and to discuss some importa...

The Kaplan-Yorke conjecture suggests a simple relationship between the fractal dimension of a system and its Lyapunov spectrum. This relationship has important consequences in the broad field of nonlinear dynamics where dimension and Lyapunov exponents are frequently used descriptors of system dynamics. We develop an experimental system with controllable dimension by making use of the Kaplan-Yo...

PIH64 FamIly PreFerences In tHe Volume Versus outcome Debate: ImPlIcatIons For tHe DelIVery oF comPlex PeDIatrIc care O’Leary G.1, Lockhart A.1, Mullenger R.2, Warren A.2, Hancock Friesen C.2, Levy A.2, Molinari M.2, O’Blenes S.2 1IWK Health Centre, Halifax, NS, Canada, 2Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada Objectives: A Relationship between volume and outcome for complex medical procedure...

A 2007 national public opinion survey of 1404 Americans revealed variations in sentiments concerning the desirability of several mobile healthcare technologies based on RFID. The survey appears to be the first reasonably national public opinion survey of US adults concerning their attitudes towards mobile healthcare technology. The survey revealed high levels of interest in emergency interventi...

When a new brand is launched, consumers are initially both uncertain of and not inertial to the new brand. Though these barriers may disappear on their own over time, a savvy brand manager who knows the relative importance of both can use relevant marketing levers to increase profits in the long run. This paper studies exactly these barriers and measures their relative effects on the launch of ...

Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation (CHICA) is a computer decision support system (CDSS) that interfaces with existing electronic medical record systems (EMRS) and delivers "just-in-time" patient-relevant guidelines to physicians during the clinical encounter and accurately captures structured data from all who interact with the system. "Delivering Geospatial Intelligence to He...

The authors develop a contingent trip model to estimate the recreation demand for and value of a potential rail-trail site in north-east Georgia. The contingent trip model is an alternative to travel cost modelling useful for ex ante evaluation of proposed recreation resources or management alternatives. The authors estimate the empirical demand for trips using a negative binomial regression sp...