A cost and performance comparison of Public Private Partnership and public hospitals in Spain

© 2016 Caballer-Tarazona and Vivas-Consuelo. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.The Erratum to this article has been published in Health Economics Review 2016 6:20[EN] Public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives are extending around the world, especially in Europe, as an innovation to traditional public health systems, with the intention of making them more efficient. There is a varied range of PPP models with different degrees of responsibility from simple public sector contracts with the private, up to the complete privatisation of the service. As such, we may say the involvement of the private sector embraces the development, financing and provision of public infrastructures and delivery services. In this paper, one of the oldest PPP initiatives developed in Spain and transferred to other European and Latin American countries is evaluated for first time: the integrated healthcare delivery Alzira model. Through a comparison of public and PPP hospital performance, cost and quality indicators, the efficiency of the PPP experience in five hospitals is evaluated to identify the influence of private management in the results. Regarding the performance and efficiency analysis, it is seen that the PPP group obtains good results, above the average, but not always better than those directly managed. It is necessary to conduct studies with a greater number of PPP hospitals to obtain conclusive results.Caballer Tarazona, M.; Vivas Consuelo, DJJ. (2016). A cost and performance comparison of Public Private Partnership and public hospitals in Spain. Health Economics Review. 6(17):1-7. doi:10.1186/s13561-016-0095-5S17617La Forgia GM, Harding A. Public-Private Partnerships and Public Hospital Performance in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Health Aff. 2009;28(4):1114–26.Vecchi V, Hellowell M, Longo F. Are Italian healthcare organizations paying too much for their public-private partnerships? Public Money Manage. 2010;30(2):125–32.Hellowell M, Pollock AM. The private financing of NHS hospitals: politics, policy and practice. Econ Aff. 2009;29(1):13–9.McIntosh N, Grabowski A, Jack B, Nkabane-Nkholongo EL, Vian T. A public-private partnership improves clinical performance in a hospital network in Lesotho. Health Aff. 2015;34(6):954–62.Roehrich JK, Lewis MA, George G. Are public–private partnerships a healthy option? A systematic literature review. Soc Sci Med. 2014;113:110–9.Barlow J, Roehrich J, Wright S. 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Behavioral aspects of communication in organizations

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Slower is not always better: Response-time evidence clarifies the limited role of miserly information processing in the Cognitive Reflection Test

We report a study examining the role of `cognitive miserliness' as a determinant of poor performance on the standard three-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The cognitive miserliness hypothesis proposes that people often respond incorrectly on CRT items because of an unwillingness to go beyond default, heuristic processing and invest time and effort in analytic, reflective processing. Our analysis (N = 391) focused on people's response times to CRT items to determine whether predicted associations are evident between miserly thinking and the generation of incorrect, intuitive answers. Evidence indicated only a weak correlation between CRT response times and accuracy. Item-level analyses also failed to demonstrate predicted response time differences between correct analytic and incorrect intuitive answers for two of the three CRT items. We question whether participants who give incorrect intuitive answers on the CRT can legitimately be termed cognitive misers and whether the three CRT items measure the same general construct

Gene-Environment Interactions Relevant to Estrogen and Risk of Breast Cancer: Can Gene-Environment Interactions Be Detected Only among Candidate SNPs from Genome-Wide Association Studies?

In this study we aim to examine gene–environment interactions (GxEs) between genes involved with estrogen metabolism and environmental factors related to estrogen exposure. GxE analyses were conducted with 1970 Korean breast cancer cases and 2052 controls in the case-control study, the Seoul Breast Cancer Study (SEBCS). A total of 11,555 SNPs from the 137 candidate genes were included in the GxE analyses with eight established environmental factors. A replication test was conducted by using an independent population from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), with 62,485 Europeans and 9047 Asians. The GxE tests were performed by using two-step methods in GxEScan software. Two interactions were found in the SEBCS. The first interaction was shown between rs13035764 of NCOA1 and age at menarche in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.2 × 10−3). The age at menarche before 14 years old was associated with the high risk of breast cancer, and the risk was higher when subjects had homozygous minor allele G. The second GxE was shown between rs851998 near ESR1 and height in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.1 × 10−4). Height taller than 160 cm was associated with a high risk of breast cancer, and the risk increased when the minor allele was added. The findings were not replicated in the BCAC. These results would suggest specificity in Koreans for breast cancer risk

Gene-Environment Interactions Relevant to Estrogen and Risk of Breast Cancer: Can Gene-Environment Interactions Be Detected Only among Candidate SNPs from Genome-Wide Association Studies?

In this study we aim to examine gene–environment interactions (GxEs) between genes involved with estrogen metabolism and environmental factors related to estrogen exposure. GxE analyses were conducted with 1970 Korean breast cancer cases and 2052 controls in the case-control study, the Seoul Breast Cancer Study (SEBCS). A total of 11,555 SNPs from the 137 candidate genes were included in the GxE analyses with eight established environmental factors. A replication test was conducted by using an independent population from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), with 62,485 Europeans and 9047 Asians. The GxE tests were performed by using two-step methods in GxEScan software. Two interactions were found in the SEBCS. The first interaction was shown between rs13035764 of NCOA1 and age at menarche in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.2 × 10−3). The age at menarche before 14 years old was associated with the high risk of breast cancer, and the risk was higher when subjects had homozygous minor allele G. The second GxE was shown between rs851998 near ESR1 and height in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.1 × 10−4). Height taller than 160 cm was associated with a high risk of breast cancer, and the risk increased when the minor allele was added. The findings were not replicated in the BCAC. These results would suggest specificity in Koreans for breast cancer risk

The evolutionary and phylogeographic history of woolly mammoths: a comprehensive mitogenomic analysis

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The attached file is the published version of the article

Gene-Environment Interactions Relevant to Estrogen and Risk of Breast Cancer: Can Gene-Environment Interactions Be Detected Only among Candidate SNPs from Genome-Wide Association Studies?

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-04-30, pub-electronic 2021-05-14Publication status: PublishedFunder: Seoul National University Hospital; Grant(s): 2021, 0320150110 (2015-1126)In this study we aim to examine gene–environment interactions (GxEs) between genes involved with estrogen metabolism and environmental factors related to estrogen exposure. GxE analyses were conducted with 1970 Korean breast cancer cases and 2052 controls in the case-control study, the Seoul Breast Cancer Study (SEBCS). A total of 11,555 SNPs from the 137 candidate genes were included in the GxE analyses with eight established environmental factors. A replication test was conducted by using an independent population from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), with 62,485 Europeans and 9047 Asians. The GxE tests were performed by using two-step methods in GxEScan software. Two interactions were found in the SEBCS. The first interaction was shown between rs13035764 of NCOA1 and age at menarche in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.2 × 10−3). The age at menarche before 14 years old was associated with the high risk of breast cancer, and the risk was higher when subjects had homozygous minor allele G. The second GxE was shown between rs851998 near ESR1 and height in the GE|2df model (p-2df = 1.1 × 10−4). Height taller than 160 cm was associated with a high risk of breast cancer, and the risk increased when the minor allele was added. The findings were not replicated in the BCAC. These results would suggest specificity in Koreans for breast cancer risk

Mixed alkali/alkaline earth-silicate glasses : Physical properties and structure by vibrational spectroscopy

In this article, we investigate the correlation of selected physical properties with structural changes in quaternary mixed modifier alkali/alkaline earth oxide silicate glass  systems,  focusing  either  on  the  mixed  alkali  effect  [(20−x)Na2O–xK2O– 10CaO–70SiO2 (x = 0, 5, 10, 15, 20)] or on the mixed alkaline earth effect [20Na2O– (10−y)CaO–yBaO–70SiO2 (y = 0, 5, 10)]. A maximum microhardness and packing density, as well as a minimum glass transition temperature were observed for mixed alkali glasses. The mixed alkaline earth glasses do not exhibit any clear extrema in any  of  the  properties  studied.  The  hardness  and  glass  transition  temperature  de-creases, while the density and molar volume increases with increasing BaO content. Raman spectroscopy showed an increase in the Q3 group compared to the Q2 and Q4 groups as the high field strength ions Na+ or Ca2+ are substituted by their low field strength analogs K+  or Ba2+. In the mixed alkali series, the high field strength ion Na+, seems to push the low field strength ion K+ into lower energy sites when present simultaneously, while such an effect is not apparent for the mixed alkaline earth glasses, where the far IR spectra of mixed glasses are equivalent to the weighted averages of the pure glasses