Owing to an increasing focus on the rising cost of medical care in the United States, bending the cost curve has become the central tenet of healthcare reform. The exact definition of this phrase, however, remains elusive. In order to affect change in the cost and quality of healthcare, the importance of comparative effectiveness research must be recognized.

In discussions on the development of the institutional framework for decisions on the benefit package of social health insurance in Germany, the English National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) is considered as either a good or a bad example for reform. According to this study, the procedures and criteria applied by NICE for making health care coverage decisions are legitimate. Procedu...

UNLABELLED Public deliberation elicits informed perspectives on complex issues that are values-laden and lack technical solutions. This Deliberative Methods Demonstration examined the effectiveness of public deliberation for obtaining informed public input regarding the role of medical evidence in U.S. healthcare. We conducted a 5-arm randomized controlled trial, assigning participants to one o...

BACKGROUND To update a cost-effectiveness analysis of rotavirus vaccination in the Netherlands previously published in 2011. METHODS The rotavirus burden of disease and the indirect protection of older children and young adults (herd protection) were updated. RESULTS When updated data was used, routine infant rotavirus vaccination in the Netherlands would potentially become an even more cos...

Magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) spectroscopy in the -1st diffraction order with p-polarized incidence is applied to study arrays of submicron Permalloy wires at polar magnetization. A theoretical approach combining two methods, the local modes method neglecting the edge effects of wires and the rigorous coupled wave analysis, is derived to evaluate the diffraction losses due to irregularitie...

We develop a theoretical framework that explains the use of amplitude modulation AFM to measure and identify energy dissipation processes at the nanoscale. The variation of the dissipated energy on a surface by a vibrating tip as a function of its amplitude has a shape that singles out the dissipative process. The method is illustrated by calculating the dynamic-dissipation curves for surface a...

Parallel frequency readout of an array of cantilevers is demonstrated using optical beam deflection with a single laser-diode pair. Multi-frequency addressing makes the individual nanomechanical response of each cantilever distinguishable within the received signal. Addressing is accomplished by exciting the array with the sum of all cantilever resonant frequencies. This technique requires cons...

To the Editor, Microdosimetry is perhaps the most useful tool for intercomparing the different types of radiation that are used in radiotherapy; the relative effects of different radiations are controlled by the different initial energy deposition patterns in cellular targets—the subject matter of microdosimetry. It is therefore appropriate that many authors have measured microdosimetric spectr...

We present a first-principles method to compute radiation properties of ultra-high quality factor photonic crystal cavities. Our Frequency-domain Approach for Radiation (FAR) can compute the far-field radiation pattern and quality factor of cavity modes ~ 100 times more rapidly than conventional finite-difference time domain calculations. We explain how the radiation pattern depends on the pert...

The toroidal response is numerically investigated in a multifold double-ring metamaterials at the antibonding magnetic-dipole mode (i.e., antiparallel magnetic dipoles in one double-ring fold). This intriguing toroidal resonance in metamaterials is considered as a result of the magnetoelectric effect due to the broken balance of the electric near-field environment. We demonstrate that the toroi...