Maintenance, particularly preventive maintenance, is a crucial measure to ensure the operational reliability, availability, and profitability of complex industrial systems such as nuclear asset, wind turbines, railway trains, etc. Powered by continuous advancement sensor technology, condition-based group maintenance has become available enhance execution efficiency accuracy plans. The majority ...

In a reversal of recent trends, private fee-for-service (PFFS) enrollment fell dramatically in rural areas in early 2010. As a result, Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment in rural areas (excluding other prepaid plans) fell slightly in early 2010 for the first time in years. The dramatic drop in PFFS enrollment was offset by increases in enrollment in preferred provider organization (PPO) and hea...

The 1990s saw the emergence of managed care into the Medicare marketplace. In the beginning of the decade nearly all beneficiaries were in the Medicare fee-forservice (FFS) program. In 1991 there were only 1 million Medicare risk health maintenance organization (HMO) members accounting for a little over 3 percent of the Medicare population. By 1999 there were over 6 million Medicare risk HMO me...

This paper develops a new decision making method for optimal planning of railway maintenance operations using hybrid Model Predictive Control (MPC). A linear dynamic model is used to describe the evolution of the health condition of a segment of the railway track. The hybrid characteristics arise from the three possible control actions: performing no maintenance, performing corrective maintenan...

The paper generalizes a preventive maintenance optimization problem to multi-state systems, which have a range of performance levels. Multi-state system reliability is defined as the ability to satisfy given demand. The reliability of system elements is characterized by their hazard functions. The possible preventive maintenance actions are characterized by their ability to affect the effective...

Much evidence points to the fact that managed care plans (health maintenance organizations and preferred provider insurance) reduce costs and offer value for money. Yet they apparently have not helped to slow national health expenditures. One explanation is that the practices of purchasers (including government and employers), the tax laws, and other market imperfections have reduced the demand...

This paper presents a revised version of a framework proposed in (Amgoud 2003) which computes consistent sets of intentions from a conflicting set of desires and a set of beliefs. That framework enables us to restate the problem of computing intentions in the context of argumentation theory. Indeed, interacting arguments are interpreted as competing plans for achieving some desire, or conflicti...

One important motive for deregulating social health insurance is to encourage product innovation. For the first time, the cost savings achieved by non-US managed care plans that are attributable to product innovation are estimated, using a novel approach. Panel data from a major Swiss health insurer permits to infer health status, which can be used to predict health care expenditure. The econom...

This article examines the methodology New York State used to set capitation rates for a Medicaid health maintenance organization. By examining the methods used and the assumptions made in a particular case, some general lessons are drawn about the ratesetting process. Greater reliance on statewide data to assure fair and statistically stable estimates is needed. Although the article focuses on ...

Integrating the health services and insurance industries, as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) do, could lower expenditure by reducing either the quantity of services or unit price or both. We compare the treatment of heart disease in HMOs and traditional insurance plans using two datasets from Massachusetts. The nature of these health problems should minimize selection. HMOs have 30% t...