Cost for clinical treatments has been continuously increasing during the last several years. With 10.8% of GNP in 2003 it became the highest in Europe [1]. In order to overcome this problem, in 2004 reimbursements of hospital services based on disease patterns were introduced by the German government [2]. Under these new reimbursement rules hospitals are no longer reimbursed according to the nu...

Introduction The thinking behind DRGs contains not only clinical concepts but also ideas drawn from health economics and statistics (particularly sampling theory). One example of the influence of economics is the literature on DRGs in reimbursement systems. DRGs are generally placed between fee for service and risk -adjusted capitation. An example of the influence of statistics is the assumptio...

Very deep near-infrared observations in the Faint InfraRed Extragalactic Survey (FIRES) have recently uncovered a significant population of red galaxies at redshifts . These distant red galaxies (DRGs) are efficiently z 1 2 selected by the criterion . We use Chandra data to examine the X-ray emission from DRGs in the J K 1 2.3 s s FIRES MS 1054 03 field. Two of 40 DRGs with are detected by Chan...

AIMS With this study protocol, a research program is introduced. Its overall aim is to prepare the instruments and to conduct the first monitoring of nursing service context factors at three university and two cantonal hospitals in Switzerland prior to the introduction of the reimbursement system based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) and to further develop a theoretical model as well as a met...

OBJECTIVE To describe the resource utilization and care of chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients in a managed care plan. METHODS This was a retrospective claims analysis of a nationwide managed care medical and pharmacy database from September 1, 1998, to July 31, 2001. Twenty-seven health plans in 19 states distributed across the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Southwest United States wer...

INTRODUCTION In this study we evaluated the relationships among the behavioral changes after muscle injury, histological changes, changes in inflammatory cytokines in the injured muscle, and changes in the sensory nervous system innervating the muscle in rats. METHODS We established a model of muscle injury in rats using a dropped weight. Behavior was assessed using the CatWalk system. Subseq...

BACKGROUND Hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) functions as a neuromodulator, but whether it modulates visceral pain is not well known. This study was designed to determine the role for the endogenous H₂S producing enzyme cystathionine β-synthetase (CBS) and cystathionine γ-lyase (CSE) in a validated rat model of visceral hyperalgesia (VH). METHODS VH was induced by nine-day heterotypic intermittent stres...