With provider payments being adjusted for performance and emphasis being placed on value-based care, large health care systems are already developing the resources necessary to pursue quality improvement (QI) in their practices. This article explains why smaller and/or rural practices also need to learn about and implement QI.

This issue of the Annals contains articles on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). One might wonder what else there is to write about SARS. There is already a glut of articles on SARS – type in the keyword “SARS” into Ovid and you will get more than 2400 references. There are several reasons to add more articles on SARS to the literature. The most important one is that there is some lo...

Heart failure (HF) clinics have had an important role in optimal HF management and the effectiveness of these clinics has been studied intensively. A HF clinic is one of the various ways to organize a HF disease management program. There is good evidence that HF disease management can improve outcomes in HF patients, but it is not clear what the optimal components of these programs are and what...

The American Psychiatric Association published the 5th Edition of DSM in May 2013, in which the gambling disorder is included within the category of addictive disorders -a long-standing and recurrent demand from the clinical, social and scientific fields. Nevertheless, the harmful effects of gambling have not been considered by the Government, which is the main area of addiction prevention.The ...

*Correspondence: Tae-Il Kim (Editor-in-Chief) Department of Periodontology, Seoul National University School of Dentistry, 101 Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-749, Korea E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +82-2-2072-2642 Fax: +82-2-744-1349 McPheters & Co., a company specializing in strategic planning and marketing, has anticipated that more than a half of printed periodicals will be digitally circ...

Analysis of variance (Anova) is an extremely important method in exploratory and confirmatory data analysis. Unfortunately, in complex problems (for example, splitplot designs), it is not always easy to set up an appropriate Anova. We propose a hierarchical analysis that automatically gives the correct Anova comparisons even in complex scenarios. The inferences for all means and variances are p...

Despite the growing interest and rapid advancement of alternative photovoltaic (PV) technologies such as perovskite based PV devices, we still believe that organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices have a significant potential for stable, low-cost solar power generation. As a matter of fact, Heliatek announced a new organic photovoltaic world record efficiency of 13.2% in the beginning of February 201...