Managing Waiting Times to Predict No-shows and Cancelations at a Children’s Hospital

Purpose: Since long waits in hospitals have been found to be related to high rates of no-shows and cancelations, managing waiting times should be considered as an important tool that hospitals can use to reduce missed appointments. The aim of this study is to analyze patients’ behavior in order to predict no-show and cancelation rates correlated to waiting times. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on the data from a US children’s hospital, which includes all the appointments registered during one year of observation. We used the call-appointment interval to establish the wait time to get an appointment. Four different types of appointment-keeping behavior and two types of patients were distinguished: arrival, no-show, cancelation with no reschedule, and cancelation with reschedule; and new and established patients. Findings: Results confirmed a strong impact of long waiting times on patients’ appointment-keeping behavior, and the logarithmic regression was found as the best-fit function for the correlation between variables in all cases. The correlation analysis showed that new patients tend to miss appointments more often than established patients when the waiting time increases. It was also found that, depending on the patients’ appointment distribution, it might get more complicated for hospitals to reduce missed appointments as the waiting time is reduced. Originality/value: The methodology applied in our study, which combines the use of regression analysis and patients’ appointment distribution analysis, would help health care managers to understand the initial implications of long waiting times and to address improvement related to patient satisfaction and hospital performance.Peer Reviewe

Soot formation and burnout in flames

The amount of soot formed when burning a benzene/hexane mixture in a turbulent combustor was examined. Soot concentration profiles in the same combustor for kerosene fuel are given. The chemistry of the formation of soot precursors, the nucleation, growth and subsequent burnout of soot particles, and the effect of mixing on the previous steps were considered

Consumption and Aggregate Constraints: International Evidence

This paper documents that region-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and West Germany. However, region-specific idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region-specific income. Also, excess sensitivity is inversely related to standard measures of openness and credit market integration and for most countries, it has decreased over time. These findings are consistent with those reported in Ostergaard, Sorensen & Yosha (2002) for U.S. state-level and Canadian province-level data, and provide empirical support for the hypothesis that closed-economy constraints may partly be responsible for the excess sensitivity phenomenon in aggregate data.Permanent Income Hypothesis, Consumption, Regional Data, Openness

ON THE USER COST AND HOMEOWNERSHIP

This paper studies the determinants of housing tenure choice and the differences in the cost of housing services across households in an overlapping generations model with household-specific uninsurable earnings risk and housing prices that vary over time. We model houses as illiquid assets that provide collateral for loans. To analyze the impact of preferential housing taxation on the tenure choice, we consider a tax system that mimics that of the U.S. economy in a stylized way. We find that a mixture of idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty, house price risk, down payments and transaction costs are needed for the model to deliver life cycle patterns of homeownership and portfolio composition similar to those found in the data. Through simulations, we also show that a rental equivalence approach (relative to a user cost approach) overestimates the mean unit cost of housing by approximately 3 percent.

A Review on the Cosmology of the de Sitter Horndeski Models

We review the most general scalar-tensor cosmological models with up to second-order derivatives in the field equations that have a fixed spatially flat de Sitter critical point independent of the material content or vacuum energy. This subclass of the Horndeski Lagrangian is capable of dynamically adjusting any value of the vacuum energy of the matter fields at the critical point. We present the cosmological evolution of the linear models and the non-linear models with shift symmetry. We come to the conclusion that the shift symmetric non-linear models can deliver a viable background compatible with current observations.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings accepted for publication in "Universe", Special Issue "Varying Constants and Fundamental Cosmology" for the VARCOSMOFUN16 in Szczecin, Poland, 12-17 September, 201

Numerical Simulation of III-V Solar Cells Using D-AMPS

Numerical simulation of devices plays a crucial role in their design, performance prediction, and comprehension of the fundamental phenomena ruling their operation. Here, we present results obtained using the code D-AMPS-1D, that was conveniently modified to consider the particularities of III-V solar cell devices. This work, that is a continuation of a previous paper regarding solar cells for space applications, is focused on solar cells structures than find application for terrestrial use under concentrated solar illumination. The devices were fabricated at the Solar Energy Institute of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). The first simulations results on InGaP cells are presented. The influence of band offsets and band bending at the window-emitter interface on the quantum efficiency was studied. A remarkable match of the experimental quantum efficiency was obtained. Finally, numerical simulation of single junction n-p InGaP-Ge solar cells was performed