CURRENT ECONOMIC AND MEDICAL REFORMS IN THE ROMANIAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

The "issue" of health has always been, both in social reality and in academia and research, a sensitive topic considering the relationship each individual has with his own health and the health care system as a public policy. At public opinion levels and not only, health care is the most important sector demanding the outmost attention, considering that individual health is the fundamental prerequisite for well-being, happiness and a satisfying life. The ever present research and practical question is on the optimal financing of the health care system. Any answer to this question is also a political decision, reflecting the social-economic value of health for a particular country. The size of the resource pool and the criteria and methods for resource allocation are the central economic problems for any health system. This paper takes into consideration the limited resources of the national health care system (the rationalization of health services), the common methods of health financing, the specificity of health services market (the health market being highly asymmetric, with health professionals knowing most if not all of the relevant information, such as diagnosis, treatment options and costs and consumers fully dependent on the information provided in each case) and the performance of all hospitals in Romania, in order to assess the latest strategic decisions (introduction of co-payment and merging and reconversion of hospitals) taken within the Romanian health care system and their social and economic implications. The main finding show that, even though the intention of reforming and transforming the Romanian health care system into a more efficient one is obvious, the lack of economic and demographic analysis may results into greater discrepancies nationwide. This paper is aimed to renew the necessity of joint collaboration between the economic and medical field, since the relationship between health and economic development runs both ways. (This paper was co-financed by the European Social Fund through the Operational Programme of Human Resources Development 2007-2013, POSDRU/1.5/S/59184 "Performance and excellence in the economic science postdoctoral research in Romania" coordinated by the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies; my postdoctoral research period lasts from Nov. 2010 to Mar. 2013)health care system, rationalization, decentralization, co-payment, hospital mergers

THE SIX SIGMA SYSTEM IN RELATION TO THE BUSINESS' STRATEGY AND PRIORITIES

Now more than ever, corporations the world over are scrambling to redefine the processes, techniques, and strategies they need to survive in an age of uncertainty. Businesses today seek an effective corporate performance measurement system to maximize the bottom line. With the advent of the Internet, ongoing globalization, and standardization in management systems, business leaders must focus on how to measure performance to monitor their continued viability and success. Many existing performance measurement systems were designed to support business practices and to monitor progress. With shrinking margins and competitive pressures, however, corporate performance measurement systems must do more than monitor. They must identify opportunities for optimizing profitability and growth, without pitting one against the other. The idea is to use performance measures to add value, instead of simply measuring for a formality. The Six Sigma method is not only a trendy "new solution", it is not a business whim linked to a single method or strategy - the study trying to draw attention to the fact that Six Sigma is a flexible system to improve the management and the performance of companies. The research paper seeks to demonstrate that the Six Sigma method refers to both the passion for customer service and a drive for new ideas, and to statistics and processing numbers, finding application in the fields of marketing, services, human resources, finance and sales, as well as in production and engineering.Six Sigma method, quality, performance measurement, profitability, growth

REGIONAL ECONOMIC GROWTH THROUGH TOURISM. THE CASE OF REGION WEST

The regional development should aim to correlate and integrate tourism among the other integrative parts of the regional and local development, taking into account the fact that a regionâ€(tm)s prosperity as effect of tourism development may be shown clearly in several stages: on the spot (as a result of direct consumption of the tourist product), on short term (through continuous absorption of the work-force and encouraging the welcoming commerce) and in the long run (concentrating capital for investment in the general infrastructure and the one of tourism, in structures of reception for tourism and in the development of urban services). The analysis of intra-regional disparities as part of the economic growth at the level of Region West starts off with the idea that each component county has a different landscape, which favored or inhibited their economic growth; in the same time, each component county has its own specific, which can be promoted through tourism, inducing in time a regional income, and respectively, a social-economic and cultural growth of less developed areas.tourism, regional development, intra-regional disparities, economic growth

Algebraic Properties of Polar Codes From a New Polynomial Formalism

Polar codes form a very powerful family of codes with a low complexity decoding algorithm that attain many information theoretic limits in error correction and source coding. These codes are closely related to Reed-Muller codes because both can be described with the same algebraic formalism, namely they are generated by evaluations of monomials. However, finding the right set of generating monomials for a polar code which optimises the decoding performances is a hard task and channel dependent. The purpose of this paper is to reveal some universal properties of these monomials. We will namely prove that there is a way to define a nontrivial (partial) order on monomials so that the monomials generating a polar code devised fo a binary-input symmetric channel always form a decreasing set. This property turns out to have rather deep consequences on the structure of the polar code. Indeed, the permutation group of a decreasing monomial code contains a large group called lower triangular affine group. Furthermore, the codewords of minimum weight correspond exactly to the orbits of the minimum weight codewords that are obtained from (evaluations) of monomials of the generating set. In particular, it gives an efficient way of counting the number of minimum weight codewords of a decreasing monomial code and henceforth of a polar code.Comment: 14 pages * A reference to the work of Bernhard Geiger has been added (arXiv:1506.05231) * Lemma 3 has been changed a little bit in order to prove that Proposition 7.1 in arXiv:1506.05231 holds for any binary input symmetric channe

Temporal Encoding of Place Sequences by Hippocampal Cell Assemblies

SummaryBoth episodic memory and spatial navigation require temporal encoding of the relationships between events or locations. In a linear maze, ordered spatial distances between sequential locations were represented by the temporal relations of hippocampal place cell pairs within cycles of theta oscillation in a compressed manner. Such correlations could arise due to spike “phase precession” of independent neurons driven by common theta pacemaker or as a result of temporal coordination among specific hippocampal cell assemblies. We found that temporal correlation between place cell pairs was stronger than predicted by a pacemaker drive of independent neurons, indicating a critical role for synaptic interactions and precise timing within and across cell assemblies in place sequence representation. CA1 and CA3 ensembles, identifying spatial locations, were active preferentially on opposite phases of theta cycles. These observations suggest that interleaving CA3 neuronal sequences bind CA1 assemblies representing overlapping past, present, and future locations into single episodes