Specialty drugs are often many times more expensive than traditional drugs, which raises questions of affordability and value. We compared the value of specialty and traditional drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the period 1999–2011. To do this, we identified published estimates of additional health gains (measured in quality-adjusted life-years, or QALYs) and increase...

The authors details information related to the 2012 certification processing activity of the Bureau of Osteopathic Specialists, which oversees the work of the 18 specialty certifying boards of the American Osteopathic Association.

Hospitals and physicians are developing and marketing discrete and profitable specialty-service lines. Although closely affiliated specialist physicians are central to hospitals' service-line products, other physicians compete directly with hospitals via physician-owned specialty facilities. Specialty-service lines may be provided in a variety of settings, both inside and outside traditional ho...

This article explores whether Medicare pays more for the same outpatient services provided in an acute specialty hospital than in an ambulatory surgery center (ASC). How financially dependent a specialty hospital is on ASC-eligible services is also investigated. Medicare outpatient claims in 43 orthopedic and 12 surgical specialty hospitals in 2004 were repriced using ASC pricing software. Paym...

My general research interest is text mining. As more and more documents are digitized or born digital, text mining techniques are in need for automatically exploring or helping humans to explore text collections in all kinds of sizes, formats, subjects and styles. The earliest cited work of text mining might be Ronen Feldman’s KDT paper [36] in KDD-95. Feldman’s work [36, 37] focused on buildin...

Objectives: To assess the maternal and fetal complications of pregnancy in mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) compared with non-diabetic patients who delivered in the hospital during the study period. Methods: The outcome of pregnancy in 220 Saudi patients with GDM identified from the delivery register/hospital database and matched for age, parity and body mass index with 220 nond...