Transformations and Reforms of European Health Care Systems: The Case of Estonia

The purpose of this article is to present the main directions of changes in the Estonian health care system following the transformation of the national economy and the accession of Estonia to the European Union. Special attention has been paid to the ways of sourcing, and the collection and redistribution of financial resources allocated to health care in different periods of the transformation. The initial changes introduced far-reaching decentralization of the health system, while further reforms led to his re-centralization. The intensity of the re-centralization of finance and health management processes was accelerated after 2008, when the impact of the global financial crisis on the condition of the economy of Estonia was significant. As a result of the introduced changes, Bismarck’s mixed system - a hybrid system - has been formed.Celem artykułu jest prezentacja głównych kierunków zmian wprowadzanych w estońskim systemie zdrowia po transformacji systemowej gospodarki narodowej i przystąpieniu Estonii do Unii Europejskiej. Szczególna uwaga została zwrócona na sposoby pozyskiwania, gromadzenia i redystrybucji środków finansowych przeznaczonych na opiekę zdrowotną w poszczególnych okresach wprowadzania zmian. Początkowe zmiany wprowadzały daleko idącą decentralizację systemu zdrowotnego, natomiast kolejne reformy doprowadziły do ponownej jego centralizacji. Nasilenie się procesów ponownej centralizacji finansowania i zarządzania ochroną zdrowia nastąpiło po roku 2008, w którym zaobserwowano znaczny wpływ światowego kryzysu finansowego na kondycję gospodarki Estonii. W rezultacie wprowadzanych zmian ukształtował się mieszany system Bismarcka, zwany również hybrydowym

SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit

A Model-Based Approach for the Management of Electronic Invoices

The globalized market pushes companies to expand their business boundaries to a whole new level. In order to efficiently support this environment, business transactions must be executed over the Internet. However, there are several factors complicating this process, such as the current state of electronic invoices. Electronic invoice adoption is not widespread because of the current format fragmentation originated by national regulations. In this paper we present an approach based on Model-Driven Engineering techniques and abstractions for supporting the core functions of invoice management systems. We compare our solution with the traditional implementations and try to analyze the advantages MDE can bring to this specific domain

Formalizing Cyber--Physical System Model Transformation via Abstract Interpretation

Model transformation tools assist system designers by reducing the labor--intensive task of creating and updating models of various aspects of systems, ensuring that modeling assumptions remain consistent across every model of a system, and identifying constraints on system design imposed by these modeling assumptions. We have proposed a model transformation approach based on abstract interpretation, a static program analysis technique. Abstract interpretation allows us to define transformations that are provably correct and specific. This work develops the foundations of this approach to model transformation. We define model transformation in terms of abstract interpretation and prove the soundness of our approach. Furthermore, we develop formalisms useful for encoding model properties. This work provides a methodology for relating models of different aspects of a system and for applying modeling techniques from one system domain, such as smart power grids, to other domains, such as water distribution networks.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; to appear in HASE 2019 proceeding

Conditions, constraints and contracts: on the use of annotations for policy modeling.

Organisational policies express constraints on generation and processing of resources. However, application domains rely on transformation processes, which are in principle orthogonal to policy specifications and domain rules and policies may evolve in a non-synchronised way. In previous papers, we have proposed annotations as a flexible way to model aspects of some policy, and showed how they could be used to impose constraints on domain configurations, how to derive application conditions on transformations, and how to annotate complex patterns. We extend the approach by: allowing domain model elements to be annotated with collections of elements, which can be collectively applied to individual resources or collections thereof; proposing an original construction to solve the problem of annotations remaining orphan , when annotated resources are consumed; introducing a notion of contract, by which a policy imposes additional pre-conditions and post-conditions on rules for deriving new resources. We discuss a concrete case study of linguistic resources, annotated with information on the licenses under which they can be used. The annotation framework allows forms of reasoning such as identifying conflicts among licenses, enforcing the presence of licenses, or ruling out some modifications of a licence configuration

Process as a world transaction

Transaction is process closure: for a transaction is the limiting process of process itself. In the process world view the universe is the ultimate (intensional) transaction of all its extensional limiting processes that we call reality. ANPA’s PROGRAM UNIVERSE is a computational model which can be explored empirically in commercial database transactions where there has been a wealth of activity over the real world for the last 40 years. Process category theory demonstrates formally the fundamental distinctions between the classical model of a transaction as in PROGRAM UNIVERSE and physical reality. The paper concludes with a short technical summary for those who do not wish to read all the detail

JooFlux: Hijacking Java 7 InvokeDynamic To Support Live Code Modifications

Changing functional and non-functional software implementation at runtime is useful and even sometimes critical both in development and production environments. JooFlux is a JVM agent that allows both the dynamic replacement of method implementations and the application of aspect advices. It works by doing bytecode transformation to take advantage of the new invokedynamic instruction added in Java SE 7 to help implementing dynamic languages for the JVM. JooFlux can be managed using a JMX agent so as to operate dynamic modifications at runtime, without resorting to a dedicated domain-specific language. We compared JooFlux with existing AOP platforms and dynamic languages. Results demonstrate that JooFlux performances are close to the Java ones --- with most of the time a marginal overhead, and sometimes a gain --- where AOP platforms and dynamic languages present significant overheads. This paves the way for interesting future evolutions and applications of JooFlux