The concept of strategic sourcing recognizes that procurement is not just a cost function, but supports the firm’s effort to achieve its long-term objectives. Organizations more and more expect from their chief procurement officer (CPO) to develop long-term and short-term plans in procurement. Typically, however, procurement is driven by a tactical spend management sourcing process aimed at cos...

In the U.S., podiatric medical services are considered to be optional under Medicaid statutes, with an underlying assumption that these services are elective and can be performed by other providers. Itmay have been easily anticipated, therefore, that podiatric services were often included in line-item cuts in a number of state budgets under the recent period of economic austerity. Given this, t...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the cost effect of surrounding acupuncture plus electric acupuncture, cotton-sheet moxibustion, puncturing with red-hot needles, tapping plus cupping on herpes zoster. METHODS Five hundred patients with herpes zoster were randomly divided into group A (surrounding acupuncture plus electric acupuncture), group B (cotton-sheet moxibustion), group C (puncturing with red-hot ...

In this study, we discuss about the energy saving in different type of building walls by using optimum insulation thickness with suitable insulation material. The energy saving is maintained by reducing the energy consumption in buildings. Heat losses from building envelope have a major share in waste of energy. So it is essential to save the energy by using optimum insulation thickness. The in...

We developed a new approach to prepare DNA probes for electrophoretic mobility gel shift assays that presents a number of advantages compared with the classical approach. The method relies on two complementary oligonucleotides containing the desired transcription factor binding sequence, one of them being extended at its 3' end with a universal tail that complements a third, short oligonucleoti...

OBJECTIVE To test the ability of an assessment-driven algorithm for treatment of pediatric status asthmaticus to reduce length and cost of hospitalization. DESIGN Nonrandomized, prospective, controlled trial. SETTING Tertiary care children's hospital. PATIENTS Children aged 1 to 18 years hospitalized for status asthmaticus; 104 were treated using the asthma care algorithm (intervention) a...

For the high utilization of abundant lignocellulose, which is difficult to directly convert into ethanol, an energy-efficient ethanol production process using acetic acid was examined, and its energy saving performance, economics, and thermodynamic efficiency were compared with the conventional process. The raw ethanol synthesized from acetic acid and hydrogen was fed to the proposed ethanol co...

OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy of written information versus non written information intervention in reducing hospital readmission cost, if prescribed or presented to the patients with HF. METHODS The study was a systematic review and meta-analysis. We searched Medline (Ovid) and Cochrane library during the past 20 years from 1993 to 2013. We also conducted a manual search through Google Sc...