The reasonable utilization of limited resources is critical to realize the sustainable developments. In the initial 72-h crucial rescue period after the disaster, emergency supplies have always been insufficient and the demands in the affected area have always been uncertain. In order to improve timeliness, utilization and sustainability of emergency service, the allocation of the emergency sup...

INTRODUCTION Operating costs are a significant part of delivering surgical care. Having a system to analyze these costs is imperative for decision making and efficiency. We present an analysis of surgical supply, labor and administrative costs, and remuneration of procedures as a means for a practice to analyze their cost effectiveness; this affects the quality of care based on the ability to p...

OBJECTIVE Disposable supplies constitute a large portion of operating room (OR) costs and are often left over at the end of a surgical case. Despite financial and environmental implications of such waste, there has been little evaluation of OR supply utilization. The goal of this study was to quantify the utilization of disposable supplies and the costs associated with opened but unused items (...

Background and Aim: One of the complex processes in the Ministry of Health and Medical Education in Iran is the process of registering pharmaceutical supplies. Currently the registration process is a multi-stage process, resulting in parallel services, a waste of time and unnecessary expenses. Therefore, an integrated system will improve the relevant service delivery. The purpose of this study ...

U.S. food prices rose 4% in 2007 and are expected to gain 3.5% to 4.5% in 2008. Higher farm commodity prices and energy costs are the leading factors behind higher food prices. Farm commodity prices have surged because (1) demand for corn for ethanol is competing with food and feed for acreage; (2) global food grain and oilseed supplies are low due to poor harvests; (3) the weak dollar has incr...

10.1056/nejmp1111662 nejm.org e48(1) into clinical processes will reduce resource utilization and thereby lower costs. Certainly, evidence suggests that there is no association between high quality and high costs.1 Yet true bottom-line savings from improved clinical quality rarely materialize, and costs continue to climb. Manufacturing and service companies around the world have demonstrated th...

A description of a micro-costing analysis conducted by the Psychiatric Occupational Therapy Department at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center is reported. Analysis enabled a department manager to establish cost estimates for the services provided by the department. Included are data reflective of both costs and overhead. The analysis generates information concerning the relative amount ...

The inclusion of water supply and sanitation programs as a component of primary health care (PHC) has been questioned on the basis of calculations of the costs of these programs per infant death averted. In this paper the procedures used in these cost-effectiveness calculations are examined and found to be wanting. The calculations are misleading since gross rather than net costs have been used...

Nearly one in five Medicare beneficiaries has diabetes and these patients face major challenges in managing their health. The high diabetes rate among beneficiaries also means that the Medicare program itself is highly vulnerable to the high costs of uncontrolled diabetes. As a result, great care must be taken when implementing any new cost containment strategy that has the potential to disrupt...

In this paper, we introduce a class of local indicators that enable to compute efficiently optimal transport plans associated to arbitrary weighted distributions of N demands and M supplies in R in the case where the cost function is concave. Indeed, whereas this problem can be solved linearly when the cost is a convex function of the distance on the line (or more generally when the cost matrix...