OBJECTIVES A recent randomized study showed switch maintenance with pemetrexed after nonpemetrexed-containing first-line chemotherapy in patients with advanced nonsmall-cell lung cancer to prolong overall survival by 2.8 months. We examined the cost-effectiveness of pemetrexed in this indication, from the perspective of the Swiss health care system, and assessed the influence of the costs of be...

The metabolic rate of precocial bird eggs reaches a plateau when about 80% of the incubation period has passed. This is unexpected, as in many species the embryo continues to grow and maintenance costs must therefore increase. To investigate this paradox, daily energy budgets were constructed for embryos of four galliform species according to two models that used empirical data on egg metabolic...

BACKGROUND In the current economic climate, hospitals and academic institutions demand that medical departments function in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Detailed business plans are necessary to build new clinical programs, and institutions have learned that new programs are associated with significant costs for purchasing and maintaining equipment. We report our experience with repai...

One kind of mid-term production system, aggregate production planning, identifies the optimum production plan for each production period. The goal of aggregate production planning is to forecast future demand swings. On the other hand, maintenance system identifies the proper time for preventive maintenance and restrains from break downs and reduces maintenance costs. Due to the importance of t...

Floating structures are designed in such way that the appearance of fatigue failures cannot be avoided, implying the need for inspections during their life. Their maintenance has to be planned from an economic point of view so as to minimize maintenance costs but satisfying a minimum reliability level. A method is proposed to quantify the repair costs resulting of different reliability-based ma...

Presented in this article are aggregate utilization and financial data from the four social health maintenance organization (S/HMO) demonstrations that were collected and analyzed as a part of the national evaluation of the S/HMO demonstration project conducted for the Health Care Financing Administration. The S/HMOs, in offering a $6,500 to $12,000 chronic care benefit in addition to the basic...

INTRODUCTION Continuation/maintenance electroconvulsive therapy has been shown to be effective for prevention of relapse in affective and psychotic disorders. However, there is a limited nubber of studies that investigate clinical management, associated costs, and perceived quality variables. MATERIAL AND METHODS A series of 8 cases included during the first 18 months of the Continuation/Main...

Advances in sensor technology have enabled companies to make significant progress towards achieving condition-based maintenance (CBM). CBM provides the opportunity to perform maintenance actions more effectively. However, scheduling maintenance at the unit level may imply a high maintenance frequency at the asset level, which can be costly and undesirable for safety reasons. In this paper, we c...

Porto, the institutional repository of the Politecnico di Torino, is provided by the University Library and the IT-Services. The aim is to enable open access to all the world. Please share with us how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Abstract: Tamping is an important part of railway maintenance. Well tamped ballast reduces track irregularities and increases travel safety and comfor...

New railway legislation in Sweden has increased the need for transparent access charges on the Swedish railway network. We estimate cost functions for infrastructure operation, maintenance and renewal in the Swedish national railway network, using unobserved effects models and calculate marginal costs for railway infrastructure wear and tear. We find evidence of unobserved fixed effects at a tr...