OBJECTIVE To examine whether basing regionalization on risk-adjusted mortality would lead to better population outcomes than basing regionalization on procedure volume. DATA SOURCE We used secondary data from the California State Inpatient Database obtained from the Healthcare Costs and Utilization Project. STUDY DESIGN A population-based retrospective cohort study of 243 thousand patients ...

This paper aims to identify and analyze the political obstacles to the implementation of Organizational Contract of Public Action (COAP) based on the perceptions of municipal health secretaries of Bipartite Interagency Commissions (CIB). For this purpose, we interviewed 195 secretaries (92% of the total) from October 2015 to August 2016. Based on the approach of policy analysis, the main hurdle...

Tetrapods possess up to five morphologically distinct vertebral series: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral and caudal. The evolution of axial regionalization has been linked to derived Hox expression patterns during development and the demands of weight-bearing and walking on land. These evolutionary and functional explanations are supported by an absence of similar traits in fishes, living and...

We study the control of modulational instability and pattern formation in a nonlinear dissipative feedback system with a periodic modulation of the material refractive index. We use a one-dimensional photonic lattice in a single-mirror feedback configuration and identify three mechanisms for pattern control: bandgap suppression of instability modes, periodicity induced pattern modes, and orient...

The leaders of such global powerhouses as GE, Wal-Mart, and Toyota seem to have grasped two crucial truths: First, far from becoming submerged by the rising tide of globalization, geographic and other regional distinctions may in fact be increasing in importance. Second, regionally focused strategies, used in conjunction with local and global initiatives, can significantly boost a company's per...

We present some numerical results obtained from a simple individual-based model that describes clustering of organisms caused by competition. Our aim is to show that, even when a deterministic description developed for continuum models predicts no pattern formation, an individual-based model displays well-defined patterns, as a consequence of fluctuation effects caused by the discrete nature of...

Information from an outcrop is used as an analogue of a natural heterogeneous aquifer in order to provide an exhaustive data set of hydraulic properties. Based on this data, two commonly used borehole based investigation methods are simulated numerically. For a scenario of sparse sampling of the aquifer, the process of regionalization of the borehole hydraulic conductivity values is simulated b...

Regionalization is to divide a set of spatial objects into a number of spatially contiguous regions while optimizing an objective function, which is usually a homogeneity (or etereogenity) measure of the derived regions. In this paper we propose a new regionalization method for spatial functional data by means of a Dynamic Clustering Algorithm. The method optimizes a criterion of spatial associ...

The diencephalon is the caudal part of the developing forebrain, which corresponds to prosomeres 1 to 3. The mature diencephalon is functionally and anatomically divided into well-defined nuclei. Previous researches have shown that LIM-homeobox genes are important transcription factors during diencephalon regionalization in mice. Here we examined expression patterns of several chick orthologs o...