An important step in farm planning is the development of a gross margin budget. A gross margin is calculated from a crop's gross income less the variable costs incurred in growing and marketing that crop. The gross margin indicates the potential financial gain or loss of the crop being produced. Gross margins are usually expressed in units related to resources such as land, labour or irrigation...

10.1056/nejmp1111662 nejm.org e48(1) into clinical processes will reduce resource utilization and thereby lower costs. Certainly, evidence suggests that there is no association between high quality and high costs.1 Yet true bottom-line savings from improved clinical quality rarely materialize, and costs continue to climb. Manufacturing and service companies around the world have demonstrated th...

IMPORTANCE Providing high-quality care while containing cost is essential for the economic stability of our health care system. The United States is experiencing a rapidly growing elderly population. The Acute Care for Elders (ACE) unit interdisciplinary team model of care has been shown to improve outcomes in hospitalized older adults. The University of Alabama at Birmingham ACE unit incorpora...

In this paper we investigate the (R, S) periodic review, order-up-to level inventory control system with stochastic demand and variable leadtimes. Variable leadtimes can lead to order crossover, in which some orders arrive out of sequence. Most theoretical studies of order-up-to inventory systems under variable leadtimes assume that crossovers do not occur and, in so doing, overestimate the sta...

In this paper, we estimate the returns associated with the provision of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, by payer type (Medicare, HMO, etc.). Because reliable measures of prices and treatment costs are often unobserved, we seek to infer returns from hospital entry behavior. We estimate a model of patient flows for CABG patients that provides inputs for an entry model. We find that F...

Cost-sensitive learning is a key technique for addressing many real world data mining applications. Most existing research has been focused on classification problems. In this paper we propose a framework for evaluating regression models in applications with non-uniform costs and benefits across the domain of the continuous target variable. Namely, we describe two metrics for asserting the cost...

The Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP) is a variant of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem in which customers are served by a heterogeneous #eet of vehicles with various capacities, "xed costs, and variable costs. This article describes a tabu search heuristic for the HVRP. On a set of benchmark instances, it consistently produces high-quality solutions, including several new ...

BACKGROUND Cervical cancer screening is a critical health service that is often unavailable to women in under-resourced settings. In order to expand access to this and other reproductive and primary health care services, a South African non-governmental organization established a van-based mobile clinic in two rural districts in South Africa. To inform policy and budgeting, we conducted a cost ...