Providing quality care to patients at the lowest cost is of primary concern to hospitals, clinics, managed care organizations, integrated health systems, and other health care providers operating in a prospective payment environment. Therapy Cost 2000 can help health care providers and decision-makers in a variety of settings reach the goal of cost-effective, high-quality patient care.

One of the motivations for research in data quality is to automatically identify cleansing activities, namely a sequence of actions able to cleanse a dirty dataset, which today are often developed manually by domain-experts. Here we explore the idea that AI Planning can contribute to identify data inconsistencies and automatically fix them. To this end, we formalise the concept of cost-optimal ...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries. In this paper we present an efficiency analysis of electricity distribution networks from seven European countries. We apply the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method on multi-output translog input distance function models to estimate cost efficiency and scale economies. We show that introduc...

In this paper, we examine the interplay of regulatory structures and the use of technology on the electricity distribution grid. The emphasis is on the incentives provided by regulation for efficient investment in capital and technology. Several regulatory structures are examined to determine their relative affects on investments in technologies, especially new technologies that can improve eff...

This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach to assess current technology systems in water treatment (WT) plants and water waste treatment (WWT) plants to find out the main implications on the quality of service. Presently, the plant production process and efficiency improvement of WWT plants has become a challenge for WWT plants. The need of cost-efficient and reliable treatment processes has...