OBJECTIVE To determine who chooses a Consumer-Driven Health Plan (CDHP) in a multiplan, multiproduct setting, and, specifically, whether the CDHP attracts the sicker employees in a company's risk pool. STUDY DESIGN We estimated a health plan choice equation for employees of the University of Minnesota, who had a choice in 2002 of a CDHP and three other health plans--a traditional health maint...

Issue: Since enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), many more women have health insurance than before the law, in part because it prohibits insurer practices that discriminate against women. However, gaps in women's health coverage persist. Insurers often exclude health services that women are likely to need, leaving women vulnerable to higher costs and denied claims that threaten their ec...

Only 17 of the 38 health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that have Medicare risk contracts and offer coverage to commercial clients in rural counties include the rural counties in their Medicare plan service areas. Rural counties in which HMOs offer Medicare coverage have higher average adjusted average per capita costs (AAPCCs), larger populations, and more physicians per capita than rural co...

Software maintenance is responsible for as much as two thirds of the cost of any software, and is consequently an important research area. In this paper we focus on the change propagation problem: given a primary change that is made in order to meet a new or changed requirement, what additional, secondary, changes are needed? We build on previous work that has proposed to use a BDI (belief-desi...

Despite prominent roles for employers and state regulation in the Clinton administration's Health Security Act, relatively little attention has been accorded to the impact of federal preemption of state legislation through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). As interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, ERISA permits state regulation of insured employee health plans but otherwise p...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to examine the frequency of body mass index (BMI) measurement before the implementation of two new Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) performance measures for obesity that require U.S. health plans to annually report the frequency of BMI and BMI percentile measurement among all adults and children who had at least one outpatient v...

: With the fast development of the E-commerce, it becomes critical to set up an E-commerce Evaluation criteria system. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process is a new multi-criteria evaluation method evolved from Saaty’s AHP. This paper aimed to find out the key factors that affect success in E-commerce using fuzzy AHP, and give an evaluation method for E-commerce in order to help researches and mana...

challenges to physicians – those with specific business interests as well as those whose sole focus is patient care. Understanding the law and knowing which, if any, of the many Stark exceptions apply to your arrangement is essential. Part I of this series explained the purpose of the Stark statute, how it differs from the anti-kickback statute and how you can determine whether it applies to ...

A data warehouse (DW) contains multiple views accessed by queries. One of the most important decisions in designing a DW is selecting views to materialize for the purpose of efficiently supporting decision making. The search space for possible materialized views is exponentially large. Therefore heuristics have been used to search for a near optimal solution. In this paper, we explore the use o...