Racial Disparities in the US Healthcare System

Provider mentality regarding minorities, both overt and subconscious, likely affects the quality of healthcare delivered. Survey research suggests that most (between 50-75%) Caucasian people believe minorities are less intelligent, more prone to violence, and less likely to be employed. More physicians identify themselves as Caucasian than all other races combined. One in five Spanish-speaking Latinos reports not seeking healthcare due to language barriers. Even when they have overcome barriers to getting healthcare, minority populations are still less likely than Caucasians to receive certain common medical procedures

Medicare Must Adapt for Aging Baby Boomer Population

Since Medicare was established in 1965 to provide insurance for the elderly and handicapped, the benefits offered by Medicare have scarcely changed except for a few added preventive services. Sustained growth in Medicare expenditures and the aging of the “baby boom generation are placing growing strains on Medicare\u27s financial sustainability. Under current practices, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Trustees estimate that the Part A Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will only remain solvent until the year 2018. On January 1, 2006, Medicare\u27s new Plan D prescription-drug coverage plan was launched. Critics have charged that unlike existing government health plans, Part D does not allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. As a result, these companies may be charging taxpayers up to 80% more for drugs purchased under Part D than for those purchased under other plans. With Medicare\u27s financial sustainability in question, Medicare infrastructure such as the Part D policy must be adapted in order for Medicare to continue providing quality health services to the elderly

Telemedicine Management of Diabetics in an Underserved Community

Information technology via telemedicine offers the potential for cost-effective and active management of type 2 diabetes mellitus for people in high-risk underserved communities such as Harlem, NY and the Bronx, NY. Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications technology for medical diagnostic, monitor- ing, and therapeutic purposes to communicate information instantaneously from one location to another, such as from a patients’ home to a hospital. We compared the baseline Hemoglobin A1C levels to the levels recorded after the patient was enrolled in the Housecalls telemedicine program for at least 3 months. The initial results indicate that the Housecalls program is effective in improving compliance and management of diabetes. The initial success of the program is encouraging and demonstrates a great po- tential for the use of telemedicine in monitoring chronic disease

Stable Randomization

We design a laboratory experiment to identify whether randomization behavior represents a stable “type” across different choice environments. In both games and individual choice questions, subjects face twenty simultaneous repetitions of the same choice. Randomization constitutes making different choices across the twenty repetitions. We find that randomization preferences are highly correlated across domains, with a sizable fraction of individuals randomizing in all domains, even in questions that offer a first-order stochastically dominant option. For some mixers, dominated randomization is responsive to intervention. Our results are inconsistent with many preference-based models of randomization, leaving open a role for heuristics and biases

Hyperentangled Bell-state analysis

It is known that it is impossible to unambiguously distinguish the four Bell states encoded in pairs of photon polarizations using only linear optics. However, hyperentanglement, the simultaneous entanglement in more than one degree of freedom, has been shown to assist the complete Bell analysis of the four Bell states (given a fixed state of the other degrees of freedom). Yet introducing other degrees of freedom also enlarges the total number of Bell-like states. We investigate the limits for unambiguously distinguishing these Bell-like states. In particular, when the additional degree of freedom is qubit-like, we find that the optimal one-shot discrimination schemes are to group the 16 states into 7 distinguishable classes, and that an unambiguous discrimination is possible with two identical copies.Comment: typos corrected, to appear in PRA, 5 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

When is Quantum Decoherence Dynamics Classical?

A direct classical analog of quantum decoherence is introduced. Similarities and differences between decoherence dynamics examined quantum mechanically and classically are exposed via a second-order perturbative treatment and via a strong decoherence theory, showing a strong dependence on the nature of the system-environment coupling. For example, for the traditionally assumed linear coupling, the classical and quantum results are shown to be in exact agreement.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, to appear in Physical Review Letter

Teleportation with a uniformly accelerated partner

In this work, we give a description of the process of teleportation between Alice in an inertial frame, and Rob who is in uniform acceleration with respect to Alice. The fidelity of the teleportation is reduced due to Unruh radiation in Rob's frame. In so far as teleportation is a measure of entanglement, our results suggest that quantum entanglement is degraded in non inertial frames.Comment: 7 pages with 4 figures (in revtex4

Fidelity and quantum phase transitions

It is shown that the fidelity, a basic notion of quantum information science, may be used to characterize quantum phase transitions, regardless of what type of internal order is present in quantum many-body states. If the fidelity of two given states vanishes, then there are two cases: (1) they are in the same phase if the distinguishability results from irrelevant local information; or (2) they are in different phases if the distinguishability results from relevant long-distance information. The different effects of irrelevant and relevant information are quantified, which allows us to identify unstable and stable fixed points (in the sense of renormalization group theory). A physical implication of our results is the occurrence of the orthogonality catastrophe near the transition points.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure