OBJECTIVE This was an evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of oral dabigatran etexilate compared with subcutaneous low-molecular-weight heparin (enoxaparin) for the prevention of venous thromboembolism (VTE) after total knee replacement (TKR) and total hip replacement (THR) surgery from the perspective of the UK National Health Service. METHODS Dabigatran etexilate (220 mg once daily) was com...

BACKGROUND The Gaining Optimal Asthma ControL (GOAL) study has shown the superiority of a combination of salmeterol/fluticasone propionate (SFC) compared with fluticasone propionate alone (FP) in terms of improving guideline defined asthma control. METHODS Clinical and economic data were taken from the GOAL study, supplemented with data on health related quality of life, in order to estimate ...

OBJECTIVES To identify trends in the incidence and cost of clinical negligence claims. To determine the current annual cost to the NHS as a whole in terms of cash paid out to patients and their solicitors and the defence costs incurred. DESIGN Analysis of records on database. SETTING A well defined group of hospitals within one health authority which collected information on a consistent ba...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE In an inner-London teaching hospital, a randomized trial of "conventional" care versus early discharge to community-based therapy found no significant differences in clinical outcomes between patient groups. This report examines the economic consequences of the alternative strategies. METHODS One hundred sixty-seven patients received the early discharge package, and 164...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The International Subarachnoid Aneurysm Trial (ISAT) reported that endovascular coiling yields better clinical outcomes than surgical clipping at 1 year. The high cost of the consumables associated with the endovascular coiling procedure (particularly the coils) led health care purchasers to conclude that coiling was a more costly procedure overall. To examine this assump...

In this work we introduce a new method for representing and evolving snakes that are constrained to lie on a prescribed surface (triangle mesh). The new representation allows to automatically adapt the snake resolution to the surface tesselation and does not need any (unstable) back-projection operations. Furthermore, it enables efficient and robust collision detection and gives us complete con...

In this paper we introduce a simple and efficient scheme for encoding the connectivity and the stripification of a triangle mesh. Since generating a good set of triangle strips is a hard problem, it is desirable to do this just once and store the computed strips with the triangle mesh. However, no previously reported mesh encoding scheme is designed to include triangle strip information into th...

AIMS Pre-operative assessment (POA) is now commonplace and follows established protocols. This audit compares the cost-effectiveness of surgeon-directed (SD) POA compared to the standard practice of protocol-driven (PD) POA. METHODS One hundred and fifty-six NHS patients who were referred to a single surgeon during 2009 were allocated to one of three groups. Group 1: SDPOA required no investi...