With the creation of the Oregon Health Plan (OHP) in 1994, Oregon placed its Medicaid program under a managed care system. This paper examines the managed care practices of seven health plans serving OHP enrollees between 1996 and 1998. Results indicated that the original vision of integrating substance abuse treatment services with physical care for OHP enrollees evolved into a multilayered, c...

We describe the design and implementation of GNU Guix, a purely functional package manager designed to support a complete GNU/Linux distribution. Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. It builds upon the low-level build and deployment layer of the Nix package manager. Guix uses Scheme as its programming in...

BACKGROUND A fundamental debate in the transition towards universal health coverage concerns whether to establish an explicit health benefits package to which all citizens are entitled, and the level of detail in which to specify that package. At one extreme, the treatments to be funded, and the circumstances in which patients qualify for the treatment, might be specified in great detail, and b...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain the reliability of applying the WHO Cardiovascular Risk Management Package by non-physician health-care workers (NPHWs) in typical primary health-care settings. METHODS Based on an a priori 80% agreement level between the NPHWs and the "expert" physicians (gold standard), 649 paired (matched) applications of the protocol were obtained for analysis using Kappa statistic ...

The proper purchasing of services has always been one of the major concerns of health insurance. Inattention to the optimum purchase of services has led to serious problems for health systems. Traditional (passive) purchasing has some weaknesses because of problems such as low efficiency in the health system, no targeted resources, low cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness indicators and poor jus...

This paper describes an evaluation of an online Student Induction and Support Package used to prepare both face-to-face and fully online students for learning online. It provides an overview of two components of the Package, the Primer and Survival Guide. It details the type and the nature of the student feedback requested via an online questionnaire and presents the results obtained. Key findi...

OBJECTIVES To examine the clinical effectiveness of a stepped care approach over a 12-month period after an acute whiplash injury; to estimate the costs and cost-effectiveness of each strategy including treatments and subsequent health-care costs; and to gain participants' perspective on experiencing whiplash injury, NHS treatment, and recovery within the context of the Managing Injuries of the...

INTRODUCTION Cognitive training (CT) offers a potential approach for dementia prevention and maintenance of cognitive function in older adults. Online delivery provides a cost-effective means of implementing CT compared with in-person interventions, with the potential of providing an effective public health intervention for risk reduction. METHODS A double-blind 6-month online randomized cont...