IMPORTANCE The Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Model aims to drive health care organizations to reduce expenditures while improving quality for fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare beneficiaries. OBJECTIVE To determine whether FFS beneficiaries aligned with Pioneer ACOs had smaller increases in spending and utilization than other FFS beneficiaries while retaining similar levels of care ...

Farmer field schools (FFS) originally were developed for rice in Asia by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for teaching integrated pest management. These were season-long courses involving 25 farmers and a trained facilitator. The main focus was promoting learning by discovery, which included hands-on training activities such as insect zoos and the use of field e...

Objective. To assess the impact of switching from a fee-for-service (FFS) delivery system to managed care on access to, use of, and satisfaction with health care for children. Data Sources/Study Setting. A 1998 survey of Medicaid recipients in rural Minnesota. Study Design. Using a quasi-experimental framework, we compare the experiences of children on Medicaid living in counties that had switc...

OBJECTIVE The AVOID-FFS (Avoidance of Far-Field R-wave Sensing) study aimed to investigate whether an atrial lead with a very short tip-to-ring spacing without optimization of pacemaker settings shows equally low incidence of far-field R-wave sensing (FFS) when compared to a conventional atrial lead in combination with optimization of the programming. METHODS Patients receiving a dual chamber...

There have been no published empirical studies comparing the experiences of terminally ill patients in managed care organizations (MCOs) and those in fee for service (FFS). This investigation represents the first empirical study to systematically compare substantive outcomes between populations of terminally ill patients enrolled in MCO and FFS healthcare delivery systems. The investigators int...

PURPOSE To evaluate clinical and tumor characteristics in patients receiving high-dose chemotherapy and autologous peripheral stem-cell transplantation (PSCT) or bone marrow transplantation (ABMT) for relapsed or primary refractory non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). PATIENTS AND METHODS One hundred fifty-eight patients with NHL received high-dose chemotherapy and ABMT or PSCT. A multivariate analy...

UNLABELLED WHAT DID WE DO?: As the amount of alternative funding for physician services grows in Canada, the usefulness of fee-for-services (FFS) payment data as a source of population-based information declines. This paper describes methods used to develop and validate an anonymous registry of the physician workforce to support policy-relevant analyses in environments where doctors are increas...

Several graph matching and exact covering problems arising in VLSI low-power design optimization by clock gating are presented. To maximize the power savings, clock gating requires optimal grouping of Flip-Flops (FFs), which depends on FFs’ data toggling correlations and probabilities. These naturally lead to optimal matching and exact covering problems. We present three problems arising by dif...

abstract in this presentation, a case of bilateral choroidal folds in patient with diabetic retinopathy was reported. by our knowledge, this case presentation is the first report of choroidal folds in diabetic retinopathy, which bilateral symmetric and horizontal folds arranged in macula. the thick choroid that is developed in diabetics may be a cause of these folds but the source of difference...