Section 2, the main portion of the paper, discusses the two primary ways of understanding software costs. The "black-box" or influence-function approach provides useful experimental and observational insights on the relative software productivity and quality leverage of various management, technical, environmental, and personnel options. The "glass-box" or cost distribution approach helps ident...

For the demand of lower localization costs, less communications costs and higher accuracy of objects tracking under mine pit, weighted centroid localization algorithm based on RSSI is introduced to localize the node. This algorithm shows relatively high accuracy by simulation and is suitable for the localization of mine personnel.

BACKGROUND Mapping patient and work flow and cost analysis studies can help determine the most efficient and cost effective way of providing health services while still maintaining the best standards of care. This study used both time and motion methodology and hospital data to assess the contribution of staff time and facility usage to the overall cost of cancer care during patient visits to a...

Reduction mammaplasty has long been performed for the correction of symptoms associated with macromastia and for psychosocial reasons. With rising health care costs, there is increased scrutiny of the relative cost and/or benefit of many therapeutic interventions with the view to determining who or what does and does not get covered by insurance plans. When the present study was first proposed,...

During the period of 1997-2005, total personnel expense for the nation's short-term hospitals averaged about 51.1 percent of total operating revenue. Contract labor expense as a percentage of total personnel expense increased from 1.3 percent to more than 3 percent during this period. By making more judicious use of contract labor, short-term acute care hospitals nationwide could reduce their s...

Responding to budget shortages, many developing nations around the world have adopted formal or informal systems of user fees for health care in public hospitals and health centers. In most countries user fee proceeds represent a small share of total public health facility recurrent costs, but they tend to account for a significant proportion of the resources required to pay for non-personnel c...

BACKGROUND A multi centre double-blind randomised-controlled trial (M-RCT), carried out in the Netherlands in 2005-2007, showed that hospitalised patients with S. aureus nasal carriage who were treated prophylactically with mupirocin nasal ointment and chlorhexidine gluconate medicated soap (MUP-CHX), had a significantly lower risk of health-care associated S. aureus infections than patients re...