BACKGROUND Lyme disease is diagnosed by 2-tiered serologic testing in patients with a compatible clinical illness, but the significance of positive test results in low-prevalence regions has not been investigated. METHODS We reviewed the medical records of patients who tested positive for Lyme disease with standardized 2-tiered serologic testing between 2005 and 2010 at a single hospital syst...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are indispensable building blocks for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the development of WSNs, privacy issues have drawn more attention. Existing work on the privacy-preserving range query mainly focuses on privacy preservation and integrity verification in two-tiered WSNs in the case of compromisedmaster nodes, but neglects the damage of node collusion. In th...

INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, the emergence of public profiling of physicians by health plans, pay-forperformance (P4P) contracts, and tiered provider networks have been heralded as endeavors to improve the delivery of medical care. Designed to align financial incentives and outcomes and rein in healthcare costs while demanding a purported higher quality of care, these efforts have been...

We propose a next generation Internet architecture that will allow natural sharing of resources among multiple organizations by dynamically reconfiguring and creating a virtual network for a particular application. Our architecture called "Internet 3.0" consists of a 3-tier object model. The bottom tier consists of a high-speed network infrastructure owned by multiple ISPs. The second tier cons...

Our goal in this note is to sketch a proof of a conjecture made by Kreweras [1] in a paper published in this journal. A poset on an n-set is said to be tiered with height h if every element belongs to a maximal chain with exactly h elements. It is easy to visualize these posets in terms of their Hasse diagrams. The elements can be arranged in tiers with the minimal elements in the first tier an...

Background Implementation of patient preferences for use of electronic health records for research has been traditionally limited to identifiable data. Tiered e-consent for use of de-identified data has traditionally been deemed unnecessary or impractical for implementation in clinical settings. Methods We developed a web-based tiered informed consent tool called informed consent for clinical...

PURPOSE This research provides state policy makers and others interested in developing needs-based reimbursement models for Medicaid-funded assisted living with an evaluation of different methodologies that affect the structure and outcomes of these models. DESIGN AND METHODS We used assessment data from Medicaid-enrolled assisted living residents and waiver-eligible community-dwelling indivi...

We study logarithmic integrals of the form $$\int _0^1 x^i\ln ^n(x)\ln ^m(1-x)dx$$ . They are expressed as a rational linear combination certain numbers $$(n,m)_{i}$$ , which we call tiered binomial coefficients, and products zeta values $$\zeta (2)$$ (3)$$ ,.... Various properties coefficients established. involve, amongst others, transform, truncated multiple star values, well special functio...

The increasing gap between computing speed and storage latency leads to possible I/O bottlenecks on massively parallel computers. To mitigate this issue, hierarchical provides multi-tiered configurations where each tier has its own physical characteristics associated performance. Selecting the most appropriate file placement policy is difficult there our knowledge no tool that systematically st...