With Medicaid programs in most States coming under ever-increasing fiscal pressures, the issue of third-party liability is receiving more attention and scrutiny. A relatively small investment in determining health insurance coverage can yield significant savings. In New York State's program, counties are compared and ranked to give a view of how well they are succeeding in identifying eligibles...

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) has become the latest paradigm in the world of Customer Relationship Management. Recent business surveys suggest that up to 50% of such implementations do not yield measurable returns on investment. A secondary analysis of 13 case studies suggests that many of these limited success implementations can be attributed to usability and resistance f...

The financial implications of implementing quality improvements are often poorly understood. Simply put, does improving quality yield a return on investment? We examine four cases--management of high-cost pharmaceuticals, diabetes management, smoking cessation, and wellness programs in the workplace--to understand the financial and clinical implications of improving care. We explore costs and b...

To meet the need that real-time access to scientific fertilizer suggestions, and make full use of existing digital resources of cultivated land, a solution is proposed based on WebGIS and fertilization model. With Jinshan county of Hubei province as a case, under the support of spatial database of cultivated land resource, the prescription fertilization system is developed based on MapXtreme an...

In this paper, we develop approximations that yield insight into the joint optimization of capacity and inventory, and how the optimal inventory policy varies with capacity investment in a single-product, single-station, make-to-stock manufacturing system in which inventory is managed through a base-stock policy. We allow for a correlated demand stream as we analyze our models in an asymptotic ...

Supply reliability may suffer due to events such as labor strikes that disrupt capacity (random capacity) or manufacturing defects that result in yield losses (random yield). Suppliers can enhance reliability by process improvement and overproduction, but these mitigating actions are often not contractible. Moreover, the investment in mitigation depends critically on the design of the procureme...

Agriculture today places great strains on biodiversity, soils, water and the atmosphere, and these strains will be exacerbated if current trends in population growth, meat and energy consumption, and food waste continue. Thus, farming systems that are both highly productive and minimize environmental harms are critically needed. How organic agriculture may contribute to world food production ha...

This paper empirically examines the relation between the Treasury term structure and spreads of investment grade corporate bond yields over Treasuries. I nd that noncallable bond yield spreads fall when the level of the Treasury term structure rises. The extent of this decline depends on the initial credit quality of the bond; the decline is small for Aaarated bonds and large for Baa-rated bond...

With rising input costs, beef cattle producers are forced to make decisions based upon the return on investment. Chemical fertilizer application is a common used method by beef cattle producers in the southeastern United States to improve pasture yield and quality [1]. Application of 80 kg N/ha to smooth bromegrass pastures resulted in an increase of crude protein by two percentage points, and ...

Crop yield in dry environments can be improved with complementary approaches including selecting for yield in the target environments, selecting for yield potential, and using indirect, trait- or genomic-based methods. This paper (i) outlines the achievements of direct selection for yield in improving drought adaptation, (ii) discusses the limitations of indirect approaches in the context of le...