Medical Errors: Getting the Incentives Right

Incentives for Service Quality: Getting the Framework Right

Getting the Envisionment Right

The central component of commonsense reasoning about causdity is the envisionment: a description of the behavior of a phvsical system that is derived from its structural description by qualitative simulation. Two problems with creating the envisionmcnt are the qualitative representation of quentlty and the detection of previously-unsuspcctcd points ot qualitative change. The representation pres...

Getting the units right

To understand applied physics, and physical formulae in particular, the investigation of identifier units is beneficial. However, normally the units are not given explicitly in formulae and have to be inferred. In this paper, we investigate how this process can be automated. As an example application, we use physical formulae from Wikipedia together with information from the related knowledge-b...

Disclosure of medical errors: the right thing to do.

DiSCloSuRE HoW DiD iT STaRT? In 1987, more than a decade before the pivotal 1999 Institute of Medicine report that launched a new era of patient safety efforts, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky adopted an untested and untried response to medical errors: disclose, apologize and compensate.1,2 This approach was contrary to the decades-old strategy of “deny and defend.” W...

Getting It Right Matters: Why Efficiency Incentives Should Be Based on Performance and Not Cost

At least 28 countries and regions offer government-sponsored incentives for energy efficiency, as well as a number of U.S. states and Canadian provinces. But, there has been little cross-fertilization of ideas and even less scientific evaluation of the results. This lack of dialogue and evaluation has led to disproportionate reliance on the simplest solutions, which generally base efficiency in...