Developing Innovative Payment Approaches: Finding the Path to High Performance

Discusses issues in facilitating, under the 2010 health reform law, initiatives to identify, develop, implement, and monitor payment and delivery system reforms to improve quality and control costs while supporting the fiscal integrity of public programs

Overdose Prevention and Response A guide for people who use drugs and harm reduction staff in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Provides an overview of the drug overdose problem in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; describes overdose symptoms, factors that affect overdose risk, prevention methods, and step-by-step responses to an overdose. Lists the overdose risks of various drugs

Achieving Accountable Care: Are We on the Right Path?

Based on the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System's ten recommendations, highlights considerations for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in finalizing rules for the Shared Savings Program, slated to begin in 2012

Enhancing Value in Medicare: Demonstrations and Other Initiatives to Improve the Program

Examines Medicare's efforts to be more proactive in the purchase of appropriate, high-quality, and efficient health care for its beneficiaries, and provides an overview of Medicare pilot programs and initiatives in chronic care and provider performance

Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on Congressional Priorities

Presents survey results on healthcare experts' support for implementing the 2010 health reform, including the individual mandate, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansion; incentivizing care coordination; and expanding cost-containment pilots

Tropical Cramer Determinants Revisited

We prove general Cramer type theorems for linear systems over various extensions of the tropical semiring, in which tropical numbers are enriched with an information of multiplicity, sign, or argument. We obtain existence or uniqueness results, which extend or refine earlier results of Gondran and Minoux (1978), Plus (1990), Gaubert (1992), Richter-Gebert, Sturmfels and Theobald (2005) and Izhakian and Rowen (2009). Computational issues are also discussed; in particular, some of our proofs lead to Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel type algorithms to solve linear systems in suitably extended tropical semirings.Comment: 41 pages, 5 Figure