With growing calls for scaling back medical spending in the United States, cardiac treatments in general, and revascularization procedures in particular, are receiving scrutiny. The American Heart Association estimates that in 2009, $93 billion in direct cost of care was attributed to ischemic heart disease in the United States.1 Much of this expense was due to an estimated 7 million cardiac pr...

In many industries, entrepreneurs are asked to undergo a process called “frugal innovation.” This process supports advances in technology that drive own spending and improve results or leave them static. ikewise, in the healthcare system, there is a shift occuring calling for a reduction in spending. Key to this shift ill be implementation of innovative devices brought orward by entrepreneurs. ...

McDonough’s perspective on healthcare reform in the US provides a clear, coherent analysis of the mix of access and delivery reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) aka Obamacare. As noted by McDonough, this major reform bill is designed to expand access for health coverage that includes both prevention and treatment benefits among uninsured Americans. Additionally, this legislation includes s...

With the global spending of more than US$4.1 trillion in 2007, healthcare has been one of the largest industries worldwide. To better plan and develop the healthcare system, an effective way is to leverage on the advancement of information technology (IT). However, despite of many attempts in the computerization and automation of healthcare services, most of the healthcare information systems f...

BACKGROUND The pursuit of equity in health and healthcare has been the key feature of health policy in India. However, despite the policy significance, the volume of literature available on this issue is scarce. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the horizontal inequities in healthcare utilization, consisting of outpatient and inpatient care in 15 major states and north-eastern regi...

BACKGROUND Both rising healthcare costs and the global financial crisis have fueled a search for policy tools in order to avoid unsustainable future financing of essential health benefits. The scope of essential health benefits (the range of services covered) and depth of coverage (the proportion of costs of the covered benefits that is covered publicly) are corresponding variables in determini...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether greater state-level spending on social and public health services such as income, education and public safety is associated with lower rates of teenage births in USA. DESIGN Ecological study. SETTING USA. PARTICIPANTS 50 states. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE Our primary outcome measure was teenage birth rates. For analyses, we constructed marginal models using rep...

We correct the double spend race analysis given in Nakamoto’s foundational Bitcoin article and give a closed-form formula for the probability of success of a double spend attack using the Regularized Incomplete Beta Function. We give the first proof of the exponential decay on the number of confirmations and find an asymptotic formula. Larger number of confirmations are necessary compared to th...

We study the problem of preventing double spending in electronic payment schemes in a distributed fashion. This problem occurs, for instance, when the spending of electronic coins needs to be controlled by a large collection of nodes (e.g., in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system) instead of one central bank. Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally impossible, we propose several ...

Micropayment systems are electronic payment systems that are used for very small payment and for their viability must have small transaction cost. In this paper we propose a coin-based micropayment scheme that uses a probabilistic fraud checking with distributed verification to provide an efficient solution to detect double spending by malicious customers and hence reduces the risk on the merch...