BACKGROUND Blended learning describes a combination of teaching methods, often utilizing digital technologies. Research suggests that learner outcomes can be improved through some blended learning formats. However, the cost-effectiveness of delivering blended learning is unclear. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to determine the cost-effectiveness of a face-to-face learning and blended learning app...

Cost-effectiveness analysis suggests that a society should allocate its health care budget in order to achieve the greatest total health for its budget. However, in ‘rescue’ cases, where an individual’s life is in immediate peril, reasoning in terms of cost-effectiveness can appear inhumane. Hence considerations of cost-effectiveness and of rescue appear to be in tension. However, by attending ...

Editors from a number of medical journals lay out principles for journals considering publication of Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). In order to encourage dissemination of this editorial, this article is freely available in PLoS Medicine and will be also published in Medical Decision Making, Croatian Medical Journal, The Cochrane Library, Trials, The American Journal of Managed Care, ...

OBJECTIVE To develop a framework for understanding factors affecting the use of patient survey data in quality improvement. DESIGN Qualitative interviews with senior health professionals and managers and a review of the literature. SETTING A quality improvement collaborative in Minnesota, USA involving teams from eight medical groups, focusing on how to use patient survey data to improve pa...

BACKGROUND The relation between methodological advances in estimation of confidence intervals (CIs) for incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER) and estimation of cost effectiveness in the presence of censoring has not been explored. The authors address the joint problem of estimating ICER precision in the presence of censoring. METHODS Using patient-level data (n = 168) on cost and survi...

In this paper, a high-Q resonator is presented and its structure is in the shape of spiral, hence Complementary Spiral Resonator. The measurement of the complementary spiral resonator itself shows that a higher loaded quality factor is provided as compared to the Double H-Shaped Resonator. The resonator was designed to operate at a frequency of 10 GHz and the phase noise performance of the syst...

The realization of practical on-chip plasmonic devices will require efficient coupling of light into and out of surface plasmon waveguides over short length scales. In this letter, we report on low insertion loss for polymer-on-gold dielectric-loaded plasmonic waveguides end-coupled to silicon-on-insulator waveguides with a coupling efficiency of 79 ± 2% per transition at telecommunication wave...

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is an important component of the economic evaluation of new treatment options. In many clinical and observational studies of costs, censored data pose challenges to the CEA. We consider a special situation where the terminating events for the survival time and costs are different. Traditional methods for statistical inference offer no means for dealing with cen...

We demonstrate suspended micrometer-scale ring resonators with quality factors exceeding 15,000. The high quality factor is achieved by using a suspension method where the disturbance of the optical mode due to the support arms is minimized. We show an insertion loss of less than .02dB per suspension bridge.