Patient Choice in Acute Care

Consumer healthcare information plays a critical \ role in informing patients who participate in or make healthcare \ decisions for themselves without direct supervision of a healthcare \ professional. One such example is the choice of facility for \ acute care, prototypically between a fully equipped emergency \ care department (ED) at a hospital and a more convenient \ but less capable urgent care (UC) or retail clinic. We model \ a strategic patient making this decision taking into account the \ limited medical information and convenience factors that affect \ the patient’s decision. This model is then used to inform the \ pricing decision made by the manager of the UC. We show that \ a separating equilibrium, in which all patients self-triaged as noncritical \ choose to go to the UC first, dominates pooling equilibria \ for moderate error rates in self-triage. We analyze the separating \ equilibrium to examine the effect of consumer health information \ (CHI) systems, and show that as the quality of the CHI decreases \ and the error rates go up, the co-pay for an UC decreases, the \ facility is smaller, and makes less profit

Queue Management in a Government Agency: the case of IRN

Public agencies are, in some cases, the sole providers of essential services to citizens and often suffer from long queues and criticality. Since queues result from higher demand than the available service capacity, Queue Management starts with Capacity and Demand Management. Queue Theory and Queue Psychology contribute to a better waiting experience, aiming at the comfort of those waiting and the regular operation of the service. This internship report analyzes the queue management of a Portuguese government agency. The internship occurred at the "Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, I.P." (IRN), a Portuguese Ministry of Justice government agency. The research for this report took place at the IRN headquarters and the Civil Identification Department of the Campus of Justice. Case-study research was conducted with semi-structured Interviews as the primary source of evidence, complemented by direct observations, direct participation, and documentation. The conducted root-cause analysis identified the lack of workforce, the citizens' aging process, the CC's sensitive information, and the accumulation of services during the pandemic restrictions as the root causes for the queues at the registry offices. Also, communication difficulties, long waiting hours, lack of waiting conditions, and high human workload were found. IRN's strategies to deal with queues were to reinforce service capacity during peak demand, offer alternative digital services, optimize services, and improve queue organization in the registry offices. The data suggest that SSTs can improve queues; as such, a set of suggestions for implementing SST in registry offices is presented.Os organismos públicos são, em alguns casos, os únicos prestadores de serviços essenciais para os cidadãos, e muitas vezes sofrem com longas filas de espera e criticismo. Uma vez que as filas são o resultado da procura ser mais elevada que a capacidade de serviço disponível, a Gestão das Filas começa com a Gestão da Capacidade e da Procura. A Teoria e Psicologia das Filas de Espera contribuem para uma melhor experiência de espera, visando o conforto de quem aguarda e o normal funcionamento do serviço. Este relatório de estágio analisa a gestão de filas de espera de uma agência governamental portuguesa. O estágio ocorreu no "Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, I.P.". (IRN), uma agência governamental do Ministério da Justiça Português. A investigação deste relatório realizou-se na sede do IRN e no Departamento de Identificação Civil do Campus da Justiça. A investigação deste estudo de caso utilizou entrevistas semiestruturadas como fonte primária de informação, complementada por observações diretas, participação direta, e documentação. A análise das causas fundamentais identificou a falta de funcionários, o processo de envelhecimento dos cidadãos, a informação confidencial do CC, e a acumulação de serviços durante as restrições pandémicas como as causas fundamentais para as filas de espera nas conservatórias durante o período de estágio. Foram também encontradas dificuldades de comunicação, longas filas de espera, falta de condições de espera, e elevada sobrecarga de trabalho. As estratégias do IRN para lidar com as filas de espera foram o reforço da capacidade de serviço durante o pico da procura, a oferta de serviços digitais alternativos, a otimização dos serviços e melhorias na organização das filas nas conservatórias. Os dados sugerem que as Tecnologias de Self-service (SST) podem melhorar as filas de espera, como tal, é apresentado um conjunto de sugestões para a implementação de SSTs nas conservatórias

PCLIPS

CLIPS is an expert system, created specifically to allow rapid implementation of an expert system. CLIPS is written in C, and thus needs a very small amount of memory to run. Parallel CLIPS (PCLIPS) is an extension to CLIPS which is intended to be used in situations where a group of expert systems are expected to run simultaneously and occasionally communicate with each other on an integrated network. PCLIPS is a coarse-grained data distribution system. Its main goal is to take information in one knowledge base and distribute it to other knowledge bases so that all the executing expert systems are able to use that knowledge to solve their disparate problems

Concurrency Platforms for Real-Time and Cyber-Physical Systems

Parallel processing is an important way to satisfy the increasingly demanding computational needs of modern real-time and cyber-physical systems, but existing parallel computing technologies primarily emphasize high-throughput and average-case performance metrics, which are largely unsuitable for direct application to real-time, safety-critical contexts. This work contrasts two concurrency platforms designed to achieve predictable worst case parallel performance for soft real-time workloads with millisecond periods and higher. One of these is then the basis for the CyberMech platform, which enables parallel real-time computing for a novel yet representative application called Real-Time Hybrid Simulation (RTHS). RTHS combines demanding parallel real-time computation with real-time simulation and control in an earthquake engineering laboratory environment, and results concerning RTHS characterize a reasonably comprehensive survey of parallel real-time computing in the static context, where the size, shape, timing constraints, and computational requirements of workloads are fixed prior to system runtime. Collectively, these contributions constitute the first published implementations and evaluations of general-purpose concurrency platforms for real-time and cyber-physical systems, explore two fundamentally different design spaces for such systems, and successfully demonstrate the utility and tradeoffs of parallel computing for statically determined real-time and cyber-physical systems

The BG News November 8, 2001

The BGSU campus student newspaper November 8, 2001. Volume 88 - Issue 51https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/7871/thumbnail.jp