BACKGROUND Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as chlamydia and gonorrhoea are largely symptomless diseases which, left untreated, can result in serious complications including infertility. Fertility problems currently affect approximately one in seven couples in the UK and there is increasing demand for couples seeking reproductive technologies. Young people are at greatest risk of con...

PURPOSE In the turbulent US health care environment, many primary care physicians seek hospital employment. Large physician-owned primary care groups are an alternative, but few physicians or policy makers realize that such groups exist. We wanted to describe these groups, their advantages, and their challenges. METHODS We identified 21 groups and studied 5 that varied in size and location. W...

Contracts are fundamental to the engagement of companies in commercial relations. B2B electronic contracting aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contracting process and to provide new opportunities for the contracting parties. Virtual enterprises, for example, can be dynamically formed on the basis of e-contracts. For the implementation of e-contracting in practice, an integ...

Some optimizations are speculative: they improve execution speed most but not all of the time, or they trade o faster execution for an increase in code size. Other optimizations, such as dead-variable elimination and algebraic simpli cation, are guaranteed to both reduce code size and speed execution. It makes sense to group all of these \contracting" optimizations together in a single phase of...

Background A number of developing countries have contracted out public health facilities to the Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in order to improve service utilization. However, there is a paucity of in-depth qualitative information on barriers to access services as a result of contracting from service users’ perspective. The objective of this study was to explore perceived barriers to util...

We give formulae for a module presentation of the module of identities among relations for a presentation of a group, in terms of information on 0and 1-combings of the Cayley graph. This is seen as a special case of extending a partial free crossed resolution of a group given a partial contracting homotopy of its universal cover.

Business-to-business e-contracting gained attention in recent years as a way to improve traditional paper contracting. However, a complete framework specifying the aspects of improvement of traditional paper contracting and the new opportunities introduced by e-contracting is still missing. In this paper, we identify the improvements and the new opportunities introduced by e-contracting. The in...