THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON ADMISSION DECISIONS

Information systems have been adopted in many fields, no less so in the health industry. Indeed, keeping abreast of the advances of the technological age, many medical organizations have invested heavily in information technologies (IT), aiming at improving medical decision-making and increasing its efficiency. Despite their obvious advantages, the systems do not always immediately provide the vital medical information required for critical decision-making, and the decisions that are based on this partial information may result in a decreased level of quality of care and unnecessary costs. The objective of this research is to evaluate the contribution of IT to decision-makers (physicians) at the point of care of emergency departments (EDs) by investigating whether the information systems (IS) have improved the medical outcomes, in the complex and highly stressful environment of the ED, with time constraints and overcrowding. We evaluated the contribution of the medical information to admission decisions by using two research methods: the track log-file analysis (with statistical tools) and an experimental study. The results were obtained using a unique database containing 3,219,910 referrals to the ED on seven main hospitals in Israel. Our results lead to the major conclusion that viewing medical history contributes to many clinical and admission decisions and clearly reduces the number of avoidable admissions

Student Preferences for College and Career Information

This study examined the preferences of high school seniors (N = 2901) for receiving college and career information, an area not well-studied previously. Key findings are: Parents and peers are rated to be very helpful sources of college and career information; school counselors are a helpful source of information for first-generation and low-income students; and the internet is a helpful source of information, but email and one-on-one are more preferred sources of information. The findings of this study are useful for K-12 education, college access, and higher education professionals to consider when developing policies and programs to provide college and career information to students

Stuck in Traffic (SiT) Attacks: A Framework for Identifying Stealthy Attacks that Cause Traffic Congestion

Recent advances in wireless technologies have enabled many new applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) such as collision avoidance, cooperative driving, congestion avoidance, and traffic optimization. Due to the vulnerable nature of wireless communication against interference and intentional jamming, ITS face new challenges to ensure the reliability and the safety of the overall system. In this paper, we expose a class of stealthy attacks -- Stuck in Traffic (SiT) attacks -- that aim to cause congestion by exploiting how drivers make decisions based on smart traffic signs. An attacker mounting a SiT attack solves a Markov Decision Process problem to find optimal/suboptimal attack policies in which he/she interferes with a well-chosen subset of signals that are based on the state of the system. We apply Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms to derive potent attack policies. We evaluate their performance on a number of systems and compare them to other attack policies including random, myopic and DoS attack policies. The generated policies, albeit suboptimal, are shown to significantly outperform other attack policies as they maximize the expected cumulative reward from the standpoint of the attacker

Signaling the Competencies of High School Students to Employers

[Excerpt] The fundamental cause of the low effort level of American students, parents, and voters in school elections is the absence of good signals of effort and accomplishment and the consequent lack of rewards for learning. In most other advanced countries mastery of the curriculum is assessed by examinations that are set and graded at the national or regional level. Grades on these exams signal the student\u27s achievement to employers and colleges and influence the jobs that graduates get and the universities and programs to which they are admitted. Exam results also influence school reputations and in some countries the number of students applying for admission to the school. In the United States, by contrast, students take aptitude tests that are not intended to assess the learning that has occurred in most of the classes taken in high school. The primary signals of academic achievement are diplomas awarded for time spent in school and grades and rank in class—criteria that assess achievement relative to other students in the school or classroom, not relative to an external standard

Fifty Years of College Choice: Social, Political and Institutional Influences on the Decision-Making Process

Explores how the process of choosing colleges has evolved for high school students during the second half of the twentieth century, the factors behind the changes, and the implications of recent developments for postsecondary equity, access, and success

Higher education reform: getting the incentives right

This study is a joint effort by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies. It analyses a number of `best practices¿ where the design of financial incentives working on the system level of higher education is concerned. In Chapter 1, an overview of some of the characteristics of the Dutch higher education sector is presented. Chapter 2 is a refresher on the economics of higher education. Chapter 3 is about the Australian Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Chapter 4 is about tuition fees and admission policies in US universities. Chapter 5 looks at the funding of Danish universities through the so-called taximeter-model, that links funding to student performance. Chapter 6 deals with research funding in the UK university system, where research assessments exercises underlie the funding decisions. In Chapter 7 we study the impact of university-industry ties on academic research by examining the US policies on increasing knowledge transfer between universities and the private sector. Finally, Chapter 8 presents food for thought for Dutch policymakers: what lessons can be learned from our international comparison

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making