Medical Tourism and Its Effect on United State Healthcare Industry in a Highly Connected Global Landscape

For centuries people have traveled to other countries to obtain the best healthcare. Traditionally these popular destinations were highly developed countries; the trend of people traveling to less developed areas for treatment is relatively new. The average person is more connected to the world around them than ever before through globalization. Information about the best practices are more widely available than ever before. The importance of physical barriers to business such as geography and time are being eliminated. Due to this “flattening” per Friedman, the competition and expertise for areas in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) can be shifted overseas. The availability of information boosts the quality of hospital care in developing countries to a level of care rivaling that of developed countries, but without the excessive cost associated. The hospitals and healthcare infrastructure of the United States are not ready to compete on this global scale of healthcare. A lack of transparency of costs, high administrative costs, and little proactive planning of infrastructure to accommodate to the trend each contribute to the United States falling behind in this competition. Increasing transparency and decreasing administrative costs can help improve the long-term infrastructure of the healthcare system to diminish the potential financial impact of people traveling abroad for cheaper but high-quality procedures. A medical facilitator could be incorporated into the hospital infrastructure to help retain some of the lost earnings. The facilitator would work with foreign hospitals and centers of excellence to coordinate travel, accommodations, translators, and after-care back at the domestic hospital. Legal liability would then be mitigated through education of the patient from the medical facilitator instead of a physician recommendation. By offering these services for the patient, the hospital can still receive a portion of the income and improve customer satisfaction rather than lose out to customers traveling on their own or opting not to have the expensive procedure all together

A public relations guide for military commanders

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Flood Hazard Perception and Adjustment in Rapid City, South Dakota

Through a series of circumstances, natural and manmade, an event of tragic proportions occurred in western South Dakota on June 9, 1972. A nearly stationary series of thunderstorms developed over the eastern Black Hills, producing as much as fifteen inches of rainfall in some locations and an overall average of six inches in the Rapid Creek drainage basin, upstream from Rapid City. It resulted in a flood which, according to the United States Geological Survey, produced the highest flood peak ever recorded in South Dakota. Although this flood exceeded the precious record peaks for selected sites in the Rapid City area, floods of greater relative magnitude have occurred in other areas of the United States. In the hours following the flood, the city was declared a disaster area and the Office of Emergency Preparedness of the United States Government moved to aid victims and to begin the task of rebuilding Rapid City. Prior to the 1972 flood, studies had been conducted by the United States Army Corp of Engineers in the Cheyenne River Basin of Western South Dakota. The studies concluded that acquisition and clearance of the floodway along the Rapid Creek tributary was not practical in light of the Corps’ cost-benefit analysis. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the need to establish long-term contingencies for flood control in the heavily populated Rapid Creek floodplain became evident. The Urban Renewal Program under the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was selected to provide aid in funding a new floodway design by officials of Rapid City and the state of South Dakota. In the process of analyzing the Rapid City floodplain and the attitudes of those individuals living thereon, physical factors such as terrain, soils and vegetation and the meteorological setting must be first examined. Such information will provide a more meaningful background to the natural causes of flooding in the rapid City area

Analysis and interpretation of the Seidel aberration coefficients in digital holography

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Supervisee Experiences of Impression Management, the Supervisory Working Alliance, and Counseling Self-Efficacy

Supervision plays a vital role in fostering competent, ethical and effective counseling psychologists. However, studies have shown that supervisees act in ways that counteract the benefits of supervision. Trainees manage supervisor impressions to the detriment of their professional growth; they withhold information that would help supervisors promote learning, clarify misunderstandings, gain insight into supervisee weaknesses and strengths, and provide feedback that would enhance supervisee competence. Supervisee nondisclosure is a particularly prevalent impression management behavior documented in the supervision literature (Hill, Thompson, & Corbett, 1992; Ladany et al., 1996). It and other forms of impression management may be particularly related to counseling self-efficacy and the supervisory working alliance. Recent evidence does suggest that impression management is related to counseling self-efficacy, but its role in the supervisory working alliance has not yet been examined. Given research findings that doctoral level supervisees in counseling and clinical psychology programs withhold information from their supervisors and are concerned with their supervisors\u27 impressions of them impression management at this level of training needs to be understood. This study examined the nature of the relationships among supervisee counseling self-efficacy, supervisory working alliance, and impression management. With more insight into impression management behaviors as it relates to the experiences of supervisees, the findings of this study provided evidence of how further research into impression management is important to preparing effective counseling psychologists

Individuating Faces and Common Objects Produces Equal Responses in Putative Face-Processing Areas in the Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex

Controversy surrounds the proposal that specific human cortical regions in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, commonly called the fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA), are specialized for face processing. Here, we present findings from an fMRI study of identity discrimination of faces and objects that demonstrates the FFA and OFA are equally responsive to processing stimuli at the level of individuals (i.e., individuation), be they human faces or non-face objects. The FFA and OFA were defined via a passive viewing task as regions that produced greater activation to faces relative to non-face stimuli within the middle fusiform gyrus and inferior occipital gyrus. In the individuation task, participants judged whether sequentially presented images of faces, diverse objects, or wristwatches depicted the identical or a different exemplar. All three stimulus types produced equivalent BOLD activation within the FFA and OFA; that is, there was no face-specific or face-preferential processing. Critically, individuation processing did not eliminate an object superiority effect relative to faces within a region more closely linked to object processing in the lateral occipital complex (LOC), suggesting that individuation processes are reasonably specific to the FFA and OFA. Taken together, these findings challenge the prevailing view that the FFA and OFA are face-specific processing regions, demonstrating instead that they function to individuate – i.e., identify specific individuals – within a category. These findings have significant implications for understanding the function of brain regions widely believed to play an important role in social cognition

Empirical approach for the residual flexural tensile strength of steel fiber-reinforced concrete based on notched three-point bending tests

When designing steel fiber-reinforced concrete, for example, according to Model Code 2010, the residual flexural strength values must be specified as fundamental properties. It is often difficult to establish the relationship between residual flexural strength values and the required dosage of steel fibers depending on the type of steel fibers and the concrete quality. For an estimation of the presumably necessary dosage of steel fibers, various empirical approaches exist for the approximate determination of the residual flexural strength values, which, however, are based on different tests and have been almost exclusively been derived on the basis of few or “own” test results of the respective institute. For this reason, the validity of the respective approximation approach is often limited. Using the bending beam database “Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete”, selected approaches were systematically analyzed and an improved approach for determining the residual flexural strength values of steel fiber-reinforced concrete was developed