Recent Developments in the Law Relating to the Physician\u27s Assistant

The potential source of physician\u27s assistants is enormous. In addition to the frequently cited Vietnam medic, many highly intelligent, motivated individuals could be attracted to these training programs. For example, in 1970, 24,987 people applied to medical schools although there was space for only 11,348. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, as many as one-half of the remaining 13,639 were fully qualified to become physicians, and many probably would be eager and able to deliver excellent primary health care as a physician\u27s assistant if given the opportunity. Many of the 650,000 registered nurses in retirement might be induced back to work by programs offering increased opportunity and responsibility in primary patient care. Other health care professionals, such as pharmacists, inhalation therapists, and laboratory technologists, might see the physician\u27s assistant role as a way out of dead-end career patterns and into more active patient care management. This article will review the important recent developments in the law relating to the physician\u27s assistant. Special emphasis will be placed on one of the most fundamental and yet complex issues surrounding the physician\u27s assistant--the appropriate scope of his practice

Unequal Error Protection Querying Policies for the Noisy 20 Questions Problem

In this paper, we propose an open-loop unequal-error-protection querying policy based on superposition coding for the noisy 20 questions problem. In this problem, a player wishes to successively refine an estimate of the value of a continuous random variable by posing binary queries and receiving noisy responses. When the queries are designed non-adaptively as a single block and the noisy responses are modeled as the output of a binary symmetric channel the 20 questions problem can be mapped to an equivalent problem of channel coding with unequal error protection (UEP). A new non-adaptive querying strategy based on UEP superposition coding is introduced whose estimation error decreases with an exponential rate of convergence that is significantly better than that of the UEP repetition coding introduced by Variani et al. (2015). With the proposed querying strategy, the rate of exponential decrease in the number of queries matches the rate of a closed-loop adaptive scheme where queries are sequentially designed with the benefit of feedback. Furthermore, the achievable error exponent is significantly better than that of random block codes employing equal error protection.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Hierarchical Censoring Sensors for Change Detection

Devices in energy-limited wireless sensor networks remain in a low-communication `sleep' mode until an alarm event is detected. It has been proposed to use `censoring sensors' to reduce the probability that a sensor must transmit in this mode, thereby minimizing energy consumption when alarm events are not occurring, and lengthening sensor lifetime. Further, since devices in multi-hop networks are not usually in single-hop range of a fusion center, hierarchical distributed detection can lead to further energy efficiency. We report on a system that applies censoring in a hierarchical network to the CUSUM test of Page and Lorden, an online abrupt change detector. In this paper, we explore via simulation an example change detection problem and demonstrate that significant reduction in the number of sensor transmissions can be achieved at the cost of a small increase in mean detection delay compared to uncensored change detection performance