Several States now use patient-based payments for skilled nursing facilities and intermediate care facilities; others are in the process of developing case-mix systems. The Health Care Financing Administration is working under congressional mandate to develop a prospective case-mix system for Medicare payments to skilled nursing facilities. If new payment methods follow the existing pattern, th...

Assisted living facilities (ALFs) have grown over the past few decades. If they attract residents with lower care needs away from nursing homes (NHs), NHs may be left with higher case mix residents. We study the relationship between ALF bed market capacity and NH case mix in a state (Virginia) where ALF bed capacity stabilized after a period of growth. Similarly, NH capacity and use had been st...

BACKGROUND To compare the quantitative antibiotic use between hospitals or hospital units and to explore differences, adjustment for severity of illness of hospitalized patients is essential. The case mix index (CMI) is an economic surrogate marker (i.e. the total cost weights of all inpatients per a defined time period divided by the number of admissions) to describe the average patients' morb...

OBJECTIVES To describe the case mix, activity, and outcome for admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) from emergency departments (EDs). DESIGN An observational study using data from a high quality clinical database, the Case Mix Programme Database, of intensive care admissions, coordinated at the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC). SETTING 91 adult ICUs in England, ...

We show how to public-key obfuscate two commonly used shuffles: decryption shuffles which permute and decrypt ciphertexts, and re-encryption shuffles which permute and re-encrypt ciphertexts. Given a trusted party that samples and obfuscates a shuffle before any ciphertexts are received, this reduces the problem of constructing a mix-net to verifiable joint decryption. We construct a decryption...

Introduction Many countries use a case-mix system for funding healthcare. So far, comparisons between the systems have been performed whenever people in a country were thinking about introducing a case-mix system in their respective country. Moreover, there are also other reasons. Especially when countries share borders, it is often the case that citizens also share healthcare services. Germany...

The foundation of case-based prospective payment is the case classification system. The purpose of classification systems is to group together patients with similar treatment requirements. The systems described in this issue take a variety of theoretical and practical approaches to classification. The critical issue in comparing these systems is whether the variation in treatment requirements w...

OBJECTIVE Performance measures are tools for assessing quality of care but may be influenced by patient factors. We investigated how currently endorsed performance measures for glycemic control in diabetes may be influenced by case mix composition. We assessed differences in A1C performance measure threshold attainment by case mix factors for A1C >9% and examined how lowering the threshold to A...

A meta-analysis compared emotional distress and psychological well-being across renal replacement therapies (RRTs) and examined whether differences could be explained by: (1) treatment modalities, (2) case mix, or (3) methodologic rigor. Standard meta-analytic procedures were used to evaluate published comparative studies. Successful renal transplantation was associated with: (1) lower distress...