1875 require treatment. CMS recognizes the importance of random variation and the need for actuarially stable populations in its Medicare Shared Savings Program, in which organizations cannot participate unless they serve at least 5000 beneficiaries. The bundled-payment initiative sets no such limits, and medium-sized hospitals typically have 100 to 200 cases for their highest-volume types of M...

Electric power networks are operated by human and mechanical agents, each with some autonomy. This paper describes two methods for coordinating the efforts of mechanical agents (relays, voltage regulators, and governors) using software agents distributed throughout the power system in order to reduce the social costs of disturbances. As evidenced by recent blackouts in Europe and North America,...

Design of BOM configuration for reducing spare parts logistic costs Muh-Cherng Wu and Yang-Kang Hsu Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chiao Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, ROC Abstract This paper proposes an approach to reduce the total operational cost of a spare part logistic system by appropriately designing the BOM (bill of material) configuration. A spare par...

In this paper new paging schemes are introduced to reduce paging costs under delay bounds. In general , location tracking schemes require intensive computation to search for a mobile terminal in current PCS networks. Three new paging schemes, reverse, semi-reverse and uniform, provide a simple way of partitioning the service areas and accordingly minimize the paging costs based on each mobile t...

Homological Perturbation Theory [11, 13] is a well-known general method for computing homology, but its main algorithm, the Basic Perturbation Lemma, presents, in general, high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a general strategy in order to reduce the complexity in some important formulas (those following a specific pattern) obtained by this algorithm. Then, we show two examples o...

Global healthcare expenditure is escalating at an unsustainable rate. Money spent on medicines and managing medication-related problems continues to grow. The high prevalence of medication errors and inappropriate prescribing is a major issue within healthcare systems, and can often contribute to adverse drug events, many of which are preventable. As a result, there is a huge opportunity for ph...

In this paper new paging schemes are presented for locating mobile users in wireless networks. Paging costs and delay bounds are considered since the paging cost is associated with bandwidth utilization and delay bounds influence call setup time. In general, location tracking schemes require intensive computation to search for a mobile terminal in current PCS networks. To reduce the paging cost...

OBJECTIVE To describe drug utilization and cost in a large hospital and to compare the impact of different strategies on cost associated with drug prescribing. DESIGN Retrospective data on drug utilization and cost, linked to patient clinical data and prescriber data from November 1998 were analyzed and modelled. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Impact of different strategies for cost control. SETTI...

Parallelizing sparse irregular application on distributed memory systems poses serious scalability challenges due to the communication bottlenecks which manifest themselves in an unpredictable manner as high bandwidth and/or latency overhead. The importance of different components of overall communication cost can be disproportionate due to the irregularity and sparseness inherent in the applic...