surgery perhaps being one exception because it may require greater physical strength than most women possess; on the other hand, women are perhaps better suited than men to some specialties such as family planning. Most women marry within two years of qualifying as a doctor and most have a family. Their problems arise partly from living in a country which provides far less support than many oth...

The Bureau of Osteopathic Specialists continually assesses the skills of osteopathic physician specialists in response to the growth of specialization in the osteopathic medical profession. Most recently, the Bureau has mandated that all osteopathic specialty certifying boards fully implement Osteopathic Continuous Certification no later than January 1, 2013. The authors discuss communication e...

BACKGROUND Drugs are most typically defined as specialty because they are expensive; however, other criteria used to define a drug as specialty include biologic drugs, the need to inject or infuse the drug, the requirement for special handling, or drug availability only via a limited distribution network. Specialty drugs play an increasingly important role in the treatment of chronic conditions...

BACKGROUND Because of the unique features of specialty pharmaceuticals and insurance plans, specialty pharmaceutical products can be paid through the pharmacy benefit or the medical benefit. While most pharmacists are very comfortable with the conventions of reimbursement in the pharmacy benefit, they are less familiar with the processes for payment in the medical benefit. OBJECTIVE To review...

With the prevalence of smartphones, app markets such as Apple App Store and Google Play has become the center stage in the mobile app ecosystem, with millions of apps developed by tens of thousands of app developers in each major market. This paper presents a study of the mobile app ecosystem from the perspective of app developers. Based on over one million Android apps and 320,000 developers f...

This paper presents research-in-progress. An extensive customer-centric data warehouse architecture should enable both complex analytical queries as well as standard reporting queries on customer data without performance restrictions for both requirements. This paper introduces a dichotomic approach, which brings together these contradicting tasks of a data warehouse. On the one hand, it elabor...

In recent years, column stores (or C-stores for short) have emerged as a novel approach to deal with read-mostly data warehousing applications. Experimental evidence suggests that, for certain types of queries, the new features of C-stores result in orders of magnitude improvement over traditional relational engines. At the same time, some C-store proponents argue that C-stores are fundamentall...