Purchasing Population Health – Revisited

Health insurance purchasing cooperatives.

S mall employers have particular disadvantages as purchasers of health insurance.They often are not well informed about the insurance options available to them because, unlike large employers, they do not have specialized staff to manage their employee benefit programs. Small business owners, who usually make decisions about insurance for their firms, typically have little time or expertise to ...

Public health medicine and purchasing health care.

Population health and the hardcore smoker: Geoffrey Rose revisited.

The "hardening hypothesis" suggests that as smoking prevalence decreases, lighter smokers will quit first, leaving more "hardcore" smokers in the population. At a population level, however, the weight of evidence suggests that no hardening is occurring. By understanding the lessons from Geoffrey Rose's model of population-level risk factor change, we argue that the hardening of the smoking popu...

Perspectives Design Of Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperatives

Optimal Population Coding , Revisited

Cortical circuits perform the computations underlying rapid perceptual decisions within a few dozen milliseconds with each neuron emitting only a few spikes. Under these conditions, the theoretical analysis of neural population codes is challenging, as the most commonly used theoretical tool – Fisher information – can lead to erroneous conclusions about the optimality of different coding scheme...