Although Medicare Managed Care (MMC) was introduced as a way to reduce costs, the effect of the program on total Medicare spending is unknown. Current literature has focused on three conflicting sets of findings including spillover effects from managed care which reduce total Medicare spending and positive selection into managed care and overpayments to managed care plans relative to Fee-for-Se...

Due to increasing globalization, businesses are managing global supply chains. Information technology and the internet have introduced new market opportunities. Increases in productivity and increasing cost pressures from global competition have introduced just-in-time manufacturing and assembly. The trucking industry, which moves over three-quarters of the country’s freight, has had to adapt t...

Number 16 INTRODUCTION Diagnostic imaging is one of the most capital-intensive specialties in medicine.’ As such, it will be one of the specialties that will be targeted for health care reform over the next decade. While most costs associated with providing imaging services will continue to increase, there will be continual pressure to limit the usage of imaging services and to reduce the reimb...

Copyright © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. A family of three persons is planning a safari to southern Africa. The itinerary includes 3 days in Cape Town, South Africa, 3 days in Kruger National Park, South Africa, and 3 days in Victoria Falls, Zambia. The 31-year-old husband takes no medications currently, but he recently discontinued fluoxetine, which he had taken for depression. His 29-y...

Capitated Medicaid managed care plans have an incentive to discourage births from high-cost groups. Under competition, they also have an incentive to appear unattractive to high-cost while competing over low-cost groups, and thus outcomes for high(low-) cost groups should relatively deteriorate (improve). We show that after Texas switched from FFS to private, capitated Medicaid plans: (1) black...

In order to keep up with the continuously increasing competition and to obtain competitive advantage, software developer organizations (SDO) need to possess the characteristics of Learning Software Organizations (LSO). Maturity is directly related to both learning and knowledge management (KM). However, the major software process improvement (SPI) approaches do not explicitly address how learni...

Several approaches dealing with the performance of QoS aware semantic web service composition have been proposed. We describe an approach which took part at Web Services Challenge 2009. It showed good performance even if large service repositories were processed. We discuss the main principles of the used approach and also its further enhancement. The enhancement includes shorter composition ti...