Minnesota: Individual State Report - State Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.By the end of the second enrollment period in 2015, MNsure (the insurance marketplace) reported that more than 300,000 individuals had enrolled in health insurance coverage through the marketplace since its launch. Eighty percent of this new coverage is due to growth in public program enrollment, with the remaining coverage due to QHP (qualified health plans) enrollment. Between September 30, 2013, and May 1, 2014, the number of uninsured Minnesotans fell by 180,500 -- a reduction of 40.6 percent. Minnesotans saved $30 million on their insurance premiums through tax credits in 2014.While the increase in health insurance coverage was driven particularly by an increase in the number of Minnesotans enrolled in public health insurance programs, enrollment in private health insurance plans has also increased. As MNsure moves forward, it is important to maintain a strong private QHP market, as those premiums significantly contribute to the marketplace's revenues

MacArthur Foundation's Initiative to Promote Midwifery in Mexico, Complete Baseline Report

This baseline report is a first step in the evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation's initiative to improve maternal and reproductive health in Mexico by helping to institutionalize professional midwifery. The foundation's strategy concentrates on contributing to lasting, measurable, and targeted changes in the maternal and reproductive health landscape of Mexico by capitalizing on and strengthening momentum around building a new cadre of professional midwives, in order to reach a tipping point that will allow for improved quality of care and, eventually, better maternal health outcomes.The purpose of the baseline evaluation was to understand the starting points for the initiative with respect to:Midwifery and maternal health care in MexicoTraining in professional midwiferyDemand for and understanding of professional midwiferyThe legal and policy framewor

(I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems(II) Reactors: A Data-Driven Programming Model for Distributed Applications

To those who can be swayed by argument and those who know they do not have all the answers This dissertation is a collection of six adapted research papers pertaining to two areas of research. (I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems: • POETS: Process-Oriented Event-driven Transaction Systems. The paper describes an ontological analysis of a small segment of the enterprise domain, namely the general ledger and accounts receivable. The result is an event-based approach to designing ERP systems and an abstract-level sketch of the architecture. • Compositional Specification of Commercial Contracts. The paper de-scribes the design, multiple semantics, and use of a domain-specific lan-guage (DSL) for modeling commercial contracts. • SMAWL: A SMAll Workflow Language Based on CCS. The paper show

'The Work of Teacher Education' : Final Research Report

Partnership teacher education – in which schools work with universities and colleges to train teachers – works and there is abundant existing evidence in support of this fact. But our small-scale study across England and Scotland shows that it is the higher education tutor who seems to make it work, often at the cost of research-informed teaching and research. The most time-intensive activity for the higher education tutors in our sample was maintaining relationships with schools and between schools and individual trainee teachers. The need to maintain relationships to such a degree is caused in part by the creation of a marketplace of ‘providers’ of teacher education who compete for funding on the basis of inspection and quality assurance data and also by the very early school placements that characterise the English model of initial teacher education in comparison to other European models such as that of Finland

WSU Research News, Spring/Summer 2016

A twenty-one page newsletter of the WSU Research News. The WSU Research News was published monthly beginning in June of 1968 and issued by the Office of Research Development. This newsletter was created to provide information to the WSU faculty about the availability of outside funds for research and educational programs, new developments that may affect availability of funds, and general information on research and educational activities at Wright State University.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/wsu_research_news/1214/thumbnail.jp

EXPECTATION SHORTFALL IN THE HIGHLY SPECIALIZED B2B IT INNOVATION

Expectation shortfall is a common occurrence in outsourcing. Prior literature suggests that strategies such as strict contract terms and proper evaluation of the vendor capabilities are adopted to avoid expectation shortfall. However, in the case of highly specialised technical products custom made to vendor requirements (i.e., B2B IT innovation), traditional strategies in managing outsourcing projects may not work as expected. This is mainly due to the complexity of the product requirements and the inability to assess the scope of the project in depth at the beginning. In this research, we adopt the vendor’s perspective to better understand how organizations in the highly specialized B2B IT innovation handle outsourced projects to avoid expectation shortfall. We uncover a dynamic innovation process which the client and the vendor go through. In addition, we suggest strategies to achieve B2B IT innovation in a win-win scenario while elucidating reasons of failure

Expanding Resources for Service: Strategies from State Commissions

In response to the passage of the National and Community Service Trust Act in 1993, state-level Commissions were created to direct federal funds to local service programs, monitor program progress and quality, and to determine the content and direction of service activity across their states. This report builds on a 30-month study of the implementation of AmeriCorps, the signature component of the 1993 Act, and describes what states and their Commissions are doing to realize the promise that service holds, while fulfilling their legislated mandate

A distributed object-oriented graphical programming system

technical reportThis report presents the design of a distributed parallel object system (DPOS) and its implementation using a graphical editing interface. DPOS brings together concepts of object-oriented programming and graphical programming with aspects of modern functional languages. Programs are defined as networks of active processes called "Process Objects" and interconnecting communications lines. These active objects are independent single threaded programs that employ much of the modularity, encapsulation of function, and encapsulation of data found in sequential object-oriented programming. The system defines a clear and simple approach to generating and managing parallelism and interprocess communication in a distributed parallel environment. DPOS contributes several new solutions to the problems of distributed parallel programming that are improvements over existing systems. The key improvements of this system include: a more complete and versatile means of dynamic process creation; the specification of complex network topologies in an intuitively clear and understandable way; seperation of the management of parallelism from the definition of computation; automatic resolution of low level critical section issues; the ability to design and develop separate processes as traditional single threaded programs; the encapsulation and incremental development of programs subnetworks; application of graphical programming concepts to high level programming