Potential research priorities arising from proposals for NHS reforms in England

This report, undertaken as part of the 2011 work programme of the Department of Health-funded Policy Research Unit in Policy Innovation Research (PIRU), outlines emerging trends and issues within the current health care policy landscape in England. It is designed to help PIRU anticipate potential priority areas where new research to support policy development might be required. We have assessed the overall landscape, as well as debate around that landscape, reviewed existing and emergent policy issues, and synthesized available evidence around these issues, to identify gaps in knowledge which may merit new research

Compressing DNA sequence databases with coil

Background: Publicly available DNA sequence databases such as GenBank are large, and are growing at an exponential rate. The sheer volume of data being dealt with presents serious storage and data communications problems. Currently, sequence data is usually kept in large "flat files," which are then compressed using standard Lempel-Ziv (gzip) compression – an approach which rarely achieves good compression ratios. While much research has been done on compressing individual DNA sequences, surprisingly little has focused on the compression of entire databases of such sequences. In this study we introduce the sequence database compression software coil. Results: We have designed and implemented a portable software package, coil, for compressing and decompressing DNA sequence databases based on the idea of edit-tree coding. coil is geared towards achieving high compression ratios at the expense of execution time and memory usage during compression – the compression time represents a "one-off investment" whose cost is quickly amortised if the resulting compressed file is transmitted many times. Decompression requires little memory and is extremely fast. We demonstrate a 5% improvement in compression ratio over state-of-the-art general-purpose compression tools for a large GenBank database file containing Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) data. Finally, coil can efficiently encode incremental additions to a sequence database. Conclusion: coil presents a compelling alternative to conventional compression of flat files for the storage and distribution of DNA sequence databases having a narrow distribution of sequence lengths, such as EST data. Increasing compression levels for databases having a wide distribution of sequence lengths is a direction for future work

The vision and reality of 'Connecting for Health': Tensions, opportunities and policy implications of the UK national programme

Copyright © 2008 by the Association for Information Systems.Mega-programmes are prevalent across the world in areas of national importance, such as health, education, and security. In the United Kingdom, the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), coordinated by the agency ‘Connecting for Health’ (CfH), is one such example. This programme aims to transform the provision of healthcare through the creation of a new IT infrastructure connecting doctors, nurses and health care professionals across England. This network will support a range of online applications, for maintaining patient records, booking appointments, prescribing medication and transferring digital images. The vision of a fully information-driven National Health Service is attractive on many grounds, yet no nation has found it easy to realize. In this paper, we present four perspectives on the implementation issues surrounding the UK Programme, which address a cross-section of the expectations and anxieties of those involved, and the multiple outcomes achieved. We examine the tensions and opportunities in what is taking place, and draw out policy implications from our work

Managing major health service and infrastructure transitions: A comparative study of UK, US and Canadian hospitals

increasingly common as health systems evolve in response to innovations and process improvements, and to the changing demands for healthcare. Sometimes new health service designs need to be supported by changes to the healthcare infrastructure if they are to be successfully implemented and sustained ? service delivery models and its built and technical infrastructure must be transformed simultaneously. Just tackling one of these issues is challenging for all involved. Doing both these tasks at the same time can be overwhelming and risky. But there can also be advantages in such radical change. It can provide an opportunity to radically rethink ways of delivering healthcare. Conducting simultaneous infrastructure renewal and service redesign means that care processes, not plausible in the old infrastructure, may be more easily designed into the new facility. Major restructuring efforts are rarely systematically evaluated with outcomes measured or best practice shared (Walston and Chadwick, 2003). However, we do know that ?whole system? organisational change in healthcare ? change which impacts on all areas of the organisation across all levels and stakeholder groups ? is often hampered by a failure to plan effectively (NHS, 2008). It is generally accepted that the successful introduction of healthcare innovations requires the approval of relevant stakeholders (e.g. physicians, government bodies, primary care providers), and that planning and implementing major changes in healthcare service or infrastructure design requires practice- based examples to learn from. While there is considerable experience in the planning and implementation of health services changes, there is little written about combined services and infrastructure change. Organisations searching for such information may have to look for examples beyond those found in their own country. Studying similar cases across different organisational and international contexts also increases the likelihood of determining pivotal factors that underpin success

Aplikasi AHP dalam Menentukan Kandidat Gubernur DKI Jakarta 2012-2017

July 11, 2012 was chosen as an appropriate day in constitution terms to hold the election of Jakarta\u27s regional head for the next five years. There are many assumptions and opinions from some people about who would be elected as the governor of Jakarta. A lot of criteria from the candidates of governor and vice governor can be the parameters to be the success key in becoming Jakarta\u27s number one man. This research is discussing about decision making methods from many options by using AHP (analytical hierarchy process) method. Tthe case model is the election of Jakarta\u27s governor. The research utilizes two comparative components namely Jakarta\u27s governor and candidate of vice governor, as well as five criteria such as issues about flood, transportation, economic, public services and credibility. The result of this research is the candidate with number six that should be most chosen in the election

Effective slip boundary conditions for flows over nanoscale chemical heterogeneities

We study slip boundary conditions for simple fluids at surfaces with nanoscale chemical heterogeneities. Using a perturbative approach, we examine the flow of a Newtonian fluid far from a surface described by a heterogeneous Navier slip boundary condition. In the far-field, we obtain expressions for an effective slip boundary condition in certain limiting cases. These expressions are compared to numerical solutions which show they work well when applied in the appropriate limits. The implications for experimental measurements and for the design of surfaces that exhibit large slip lengths are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Rigidly Rotating Strings in Stationary Spacetimes

In this paper we study the motion of a rigidly rotating Nambu-Goto test string in a stationary axisymmetric background spacetime. As special examples we consider the rigid rotation of strings in flat spacetime, where explicit analytic solutions can be obtained, and in the Kerr spacetime where we find an interesting new family of test string solutions. We present a detailed classification of these solutions in the Kerr background.Comment: 19 pages, Latex, 9 figures, revised for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravit