Assessing the evolution of primary healthcare organizations and their performance (2005-2010) in two regions of Québec province: Montréal and Montérégie

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Canadian healthcare system is currently experiencing important organizational transformations through the reform of primary healthcare (PHC). These reforms vary in scope but share a common feature of proposing the transformation of PHC organizations by implementing new models of PHC organization. These models vary in their performance with respect to client affiliation, utilization of services, experience of care and perceived outcomes of care.</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>In early 2005 we conducted a study in the two most populous regions of Quebec province (Montreal and Montérégie) which assessed the association between prevailing models of primary healthcare (PHC) and population-level experience of care. The <b>goal </b>of the present research project is to track the <it>evolution </it>of PHC organizational models and their relative performance through the reform process (from 2005 until 2010) and to assess factors at the organizational and contextual levels that are associated with the transformation of PHC organizations and their performance.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>This study will consist of three interrelated surveys, hierarchically nested. The first survey is a population-based survey of randomly-selected adults from two populous regions in the province of Quebec. This survey will assess the current affiliation of people with PHC organizations, their level of utilization of healthcare services, attributes of their experience of care, reception of preventive and curative services and perception of unmet needs for care. The second survey is an organizational survey of PHC organizations assessing aspects related to their vision, organizational structure, level of resources, and clinical practice characteristics. This information will serve to develop a taxonomy of organizations using a mixed methods approach of factorial analysis and principal component analysis. The third survey is an assessment of the organizational context in which PHC organizations are evolving. The five year prospective period will serve as a natural experiment to assess contextual and organizational factors (in 2005) associated with migration of PHC organizational models into new forms or models (in 2010) and assess the impact of this evolution on the performance of PHC.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The results of this study will shed light on changes brought about in the organization of PHC and on factors associated with these changes.</p

Soil Moisture Estimation from GPR Hyperbola Fitting in the Agricultural Root Zone

The upper 30 cm of the soil profile, which hosts the majority of the root biomass, can be considered as the agricultural root zone of most temperate crops. The electromagnetic wave velocity in the soil obtained from reflection hyperbolas in ground penetrating radar (GPR) data can be used to estimate soil moisture (SM). Finding shallow hyperbolas in a radargram and minimizing the subjective error associated with the hyperbola fitting are the main challenges in this approach. Nevertheless, were motivated by the recent improvements of hyperbola-fitting algorithms, which can reduce the subjective error and processing time. To overcome the difficulty of finding very shallow hyperbolas, we applied the hyperbola-fitting method to reflections ranging from 27-50 cm depth using a 500 MHz center frequency GPR and compared the estimated SM with vertically installed, 30 cm long Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) probe data. We also compared TDR and GPR sample areas in a 2-D plane using different GPR survey types and different hyperbola depths. SM measured with TDR and estimated with GPR were not significantly different according to Mann-Whitney’s test. Our analyses showed that the measured and the estimated SM has a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.03 m3 m-3. In conclusion, the proposed method might be suitable to estimate SM with an acceptable accuracy in the root zone if the soil profile is fairly uniform within the application depth range