About 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries enroll in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans but do so at a relatively high-cost. This paper explores the advantages and challenges of introducing competitive bidding among MA plans (Plan One) or among MA plans and Fee-for-Service (Plan Two or Premium Support). We conclude that competitive bidding could reduce the cost of Medicare, especially in den...

“Strategy implementation” is an inseparable part of strategic management process. Transformation strategies to typical operations and daily functions of staff exert a significant role in organization success. Balanced scorecard (BSC) and strategy map help senior managers to perfectly implement and monitor the accomplishment of the strategies by transforming strategies into operational programs....

BACKGROUND The treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE) has undergone dramatic changes as newer medicines have become available in recent years. Optimal care of these patients requires a comprehensive management plan. Although several consensus papers have been published concerning the diagnosis and treatment of HAE, guidelines for a comprehensive management plan have not been developed. OBJE...

This paper presents a iheory of multi-period salesforce compensation in which a firm experiences a production learning effect. Firm management uses the salesforce compensation plan to promote current period svles (and production) in order to lower future period production costs. The iirm management (principal)-salespcrron (agent) relationship is modeled as an agency relationship. The model is a...

conclusions project management may benefit both the managerial and scientific aspects of medical projects and reduce fund waste. however, little has been written to date on project management in the context of clinical research. the suggestions represent the views of the individual authors. to provide a high level of evidence in this regard, we recommend that a randomized controlled trial be pe...

land use optimization is one of the appropriate methods for soil conservation which helps decision makers and watershed planners in order to make the optimum decision among different land uses. the main objective of this research was to find the optimum area of each land use to reduce soil erosion rate as well as to increase the income of stakeholders in golroudbar watershed located in semnan p...

A key to success for management information systems (MIS) graduates is good communication skills, especially writing skills. An effort to incorporate writing assignments and instruction into a sequence of MIS courses at a major midwestern university is having the unintended but substantial benefit of helping the MIS program create an assessment plan that includes all elements required by the As...

We address multi-agent planning problems in dynamic environments motivated by assisting human teams in disaster emergency response. It is challenging because most goals are revealed during execution, where uncertainty in the duration and outcome of actions plays a significant role, and where unexpected events can cause large disruptions to existing plans. The key to our approach is giving human...

This paper discusses how a plan execution system could be used to assist in a knowledge management task, such as searching a set of databases for a relevant document. PARETO iS a plan execution system based on the as-needed expansion of a hierarchy of sketchy plans. It has been adapted for use in several different domains. There are several problems that would arise in adapting PARETO to assist...

Work is described which seeks to support mixed initiative interaction between a "task assignment" or "command" agent and a planning agent. Each agent maintains an agenda of outstanding tasks it is engaged in and uses a common representation of tasks, plans, processes and activities based on the notion that these are all "constraints on behaviour". Interaction between the agents uses explicit ta...