Patient-physician interactions are increasingly influenced by the extraordinary diversification of populations and rapid expansion of medical knowledge that characterize our modern era. By contrast, the patient-physician interaction models currently used to teach medical trainees have little capacity to address these twin challenges. We developed a new model of patient-physician interaction to ...

This paper derives the optimal production-shipment policy for a vendor-buyer integrated system with rework process and a cost lessening product delivery plan. The objective is to derive the optimal production lot size and number of deliveries that minimizes total costs for the proposed vendor-buyer integrated system. This paper extends the work of Chiu et al. [Joint determination of the product...

This paper proposes an inverse lot-sizing model for eliciting the cost parameters (the setup, holding, and backlog costs) of a supplier from earlier demand vs. optimal lot-size pairs. It is assumed that the supplier solves a single-item, multi-period, uncapacitated lot-sizing problem with backlogs to optimality to calculate its lot-sizes, and the buyer is aware of this fact. The inverse optimiz...

The wafer defects influence the yield of a wafer. The integrated circuits (IC) manufacturers usually use a Poisson distribution based c-chart to monitor the lot-to-lot wafer defects. As the wafer size increases, defects on wafer tend to cluster. When the c-chart is used, the clustered defects frequently cause erroneous results. The main objective of this study is to develop a hierarchical adapt...

BACKGROUND Between-reagent lot verification is a routine laboratory exercise in which a set of samples is tested in parallel with an existing reagent lot and a candidate reagent lot (before the candidate lot is committed to test patient samples). The exercise aims to verify and maintain consistency in the analytical performance of a test. We examined the limitations of a routine between-reagent...

Monitoring the quality of supplementary immunization activities (SIAs) is a key tool for polio eradication. Regular monitoring data, however, are often unreliable, showing high coverage levels in virtually all areas, including those with ongoing virus circulation. To address this challenge, lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) was introduced in 2009 as an additional tool to monitor SIA quality...