OBJECTIVES To test the extent to which two existing ambulatory case mix measures (Ambulatory Visit Groups and Ambulatory Patient Groups) and other variables can explain resource use variations in ophthalmic outpatient visits. DESIGN Three week prospective study of three consultant outpatient clinics. SETTING One ophthalmic hospital (Sunderland Eye Infirmary, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear) and t...

Mediation is an important application of XML. The MIX mediator uses Document Type De nitions (DTDs) to assist the user in query formulation and query processors in running queries more e ciently. We provide an algorithm for inferring the view DTD from the view de nition and the source DTDs. We develop a metric of the quality of the inference algorithm's view DTD by formalizing the notions of so...

Rival firms often cooperate horizontally in order to share risks and achieve scale advantages in production or in their research and development projects. The output of these strategic alliances is usually sold by the individual ally company under its own brand and using its own marketing mix strategies. Marketing strategies create a cumulative effect that is reflected in brand value. Although ...

A user is only anonymous within a set of other users. Hence, the core functionality of an anonymity providing technique is to establish an anonymity set. In open environments, such as the Internet, the established anonymity sets in the whole are observable and change with every anonymous communication. We use this fact of changing anonymity sets and present a model where we can determine the pr...

BACKGROUND The Australian government sponsored five local trials aimed at addressing problems in after hours (AH) primary medical care (PMC). The study's objective was to determine if the four trials, where telephone triage was the sole innovation, led to a reduction in AH service utilisation and change in service mix towards AH GP clinics. Changes in utilisation and mix of AH GP clinic and hom...

All voting protocols proposed so far, with the exception of a few, have the property that the privacy of the ballot is only computational. In this paper we outline a new and conceptually simple approach allowing us to construct a protocol in which the privacy of the ballot is unconditional. Our basic idea is to modify the protocol of Fujioka, Okamoto and Ohta[10], which uses blind signatures so...

OBJECTIVES Uncertainties exist about when and how best to adjust performance measures for case mix. Our aims are to quantify the impact of case-mix adjustment on practice-level scores in a national survey of patient experience, to identify why and when it may be useful to adjust for case mix, and to discuss unresolved policy issues regarding the use of case-mix adjustment in performance measure...

mebudipine is a new dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker, synthesized in our laboratory, for treatment of hypertension. it has shown a better efficacy than other drugs in this group. for assessing the risks of this drug, certain safety tests in the preclinical stage have been performed. in this study mutagenic effect of mebudipine was evaluated using ames assay that could assess the mutageni...