ublic reporting of comparative quality performance measurements of healthcare providers is a recent U.S. and world trend: not a fad. While there are significant benefits to be derived from such an initiative, there are staggering hurdles that must be overcome as well. For 10 years, I have been privileged to view public reporting at the very interface of purchaser-provider interaction in the Cle...

Background The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) established the Quality Initiative in 1998 to improve health care quality in California. Since then, the Quality Initiative has been a catalyst in stimulating consumer-driven improvement of health care quality by fostering the development and dissemination of salient and standardized quality-of-care measures; stimulating consumer and purcha...

Conservation programs faced with limited budgets often use a competitive enrollment mechanism. Goals of enrollment might include minimizing program expenditures, encouraging broad participation, and inducing adoption of enhanced environmental practices. We use experimental methods to evaluate an auction mechanism that incorporates bid maximums and quality adjustments. We examine this mechanism’...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that: (i) the provider is (at least to some extent) altruistic; (ii) one dimension of quality is verifiable (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2); (iii) the two quality dimensions can be either substitutes or complements. Our main r...

We are, therefore, left to pity the poor panel patient who is being passed over the counter like the dumb, unresisting pound of tea. But if Dr. Cox is right in saying that what takes place is just what happens in private practice, how is the evil going to be remedied by getting rid of the panels ? A panel is merely a list of the patients for whom a doctor has accepted responsibility, and if he ...

This paper analyzes polluters’ incentives to move from a traditional command and control (CAC) environmental regulatory regime to a tradable permits (TPP) regime. Existing work in environmental economics does not model how firms contest and bargain over actual regulatory implementation in CAC regimes, and therefore fail to compare TPP regimes with any CAC regime that is actually observed. This ...

The degree of missing cofactor in a cofactor-dependent enzyme is widely used as a biomarker of cofactor deficiency. The degree of missing cofactor can be expressed either as the proportion of enzyme without cofactor, or as the relative increase in enzyme with cofactor after addition of excess cofactor to the sample. Especially for enzymes with thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) as a cofactor, the rel...

President Obama has discovered first-hand how difficult wrangling the interests of a dozen nations can be. For six years, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been in negotiations and might prove to be Obama’s crowning foreign policy achievement. If the 12-nation Free Trade Agreement (FTA) passes, it will shape the future of economic development in the Asia-Pacific and cement the U.S. as the...

Whereas Business Process Management (BPM) systematically guides employee participation in business processes, there has been little support, use or development of user-friendly functions to improve the efficiency of those processes. To enhance business process efficiency, it is necessary to provide automatic rational task allocation and work-item importance prioritization, so that task performe...

A new inclusion compound (IC) using di-t-buthyl nitroxide (DBNO) radical and tris(o-phenylenedioxy)cyclotriphosphazene (TPP) (1), which has an organic onedimensional (1-D) nanochannel in the crystal, is reported. According to the characterization using thermogravimetric analysis (TG), ESR measurements, etc., the composition of the inclusion compound was assigned as TPP:DBNO = 1:0.62. The narrow...