Prospective payments systems (diagnosis-related groups, DRG) to reimburse hospital inpatient care became very popular two decades ago (Ellis and McGuire, 1993). DRGs, however, may incentivize dishonest provider behavior, like inappropriately early discharge of patients, withholding of (necessary) diagnostics and therapies, cream-skimming of low-cost patients or coding of patients into groups wi...

BACKGROUND Since 2012, Swiss inpatient dermatology is funded through a flat rate payment system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). OBJECTIVE To analyze the reimbursement of nonsurgically treated severe disorders of the skin under the system called SwissDRG. METHODS Three retrospective, cross-sectional cohort studies were performed. Data sets were received from the Swiss Federal Offic...

Since 1995 Australian health insurers have been able to purchase health services pro-actively through negotiating contracts with hospitals, but little is known about their experience of purchasing. This paper examines the current status of purchasing through interviews with senior managers representing all Australian private health insurers. Many of the traditional tools used to generate compet...

Chemokines and their receptors are essential for the development and organization of the hematopoietic/lymphopoietic system and have now been shown to be expressed by different types of cells in the nervous system. In mouse embryos, we observed expression of the chemokine (CXC motif) receptor 4 (CXCR4) by neural crest cells migrating from the dorsal neural tube and in the dorsal root ganglia (D...

No molecular biomarkers have been proven applicable in clinical practice to identify patients who can benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). In this study, we established a biomarker, RPMB, short for promotor methylation burden of DNA repair genes (DRGs), the subgroup might NSCLC. Methylation profiles 828 NSCLC primary tumors and their information were downloaded...

We study model predictions for the abundance and clustering of high-redshift galaxies, and for the properties of their descendants. We focus on three high-redshift populations: Lyman break galaxies at z ∼ 3 (LBGs), optically selected star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 2 (BXs), and distant red galaxies at z ∼ 2 (DRGs). We select model galaxies from mock catalogues using the observationally defined col...

Neuropathic cancer pain is caused by tumors compressing the spinal nerve roots and is usually difficult to treat. The aim of current study was to determine the influence of NGF antibody on pain-related markers and behavior in a mouse model of neuropathic cancer pain. Twenty mice were used to model neuropathic cancer pain by applying murine sarcoma cells to their left sciatic nerve. Ten mice wer...

BACKGROUND To test the hypothesis that complications increase the use of resources in managing patients in hospitals, we examined the costs of managing patients with the same disease with and without complications. METHODS We used a database developed by the University HealthSystems Consortium that contains the costs of managing more than 1 million patients in 60 University hospitals. We crea...

England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden spend less as a share of gross domestic product on hospital care than the United States while delivering high-quality services. All five European countries have hospital payment systems based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) that classify patients of similar clinical characteristics and comparable costs. Inspired by Medicare's inpatient pr...