Reform at Risk — Mandating Participation in Alternative Payment Plans

In an ambitious effort to slow the growth of health care costs, the Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and armed it with broad authority to test new approaches to reimbursement for health care (payment models) and delivery-system reforms. CMMI was meant to be the government’s innovation laboratory for health care: an entity with the independence to break with past practices and the power to experiment with bold new approaches. Over the past year, however, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has quietly hobbled CMMI, imperiling its ability to generate meaningful data on strategies for reducing spending on Medicare and Medicaid

Using a Welcome Wagon Approach to Reach Out to Woodland Owners in Appalachian Ohio

A welcome wagon approach was used to provide new forest landowners in southern Ohio with information to help them make informed decisions about the management of their forest resources. New forest landowner information was gathered from county auditor records, and landowners were provided with contact information for agencies and organizations to consult for assistance and an invitation to pick up a woodland owner resource packet containing a wide array of materials and information to help them with the management process

Microwave-assisted Bohlmann–Rahtz synthesis of highly-substituted 2-aminonicotinates

Microwave irradiation of 2-carbethoxyacetamidine and an ethynyl ketone under acidic or basic conditions in ethanol at 150 °C for 1.5 h facilitated Bohlmann-Rahtz pyridine synthesis to give highly-substituted ethyl 2 aminonicotinates with total regiocontrol and in reasonable to excellent yield, following purification by immobiliza tion upon an acidic resin

Proper Basic Hoof Care

This publication provides information and procedures for proper hoof care and shoeing

Poisonous Plants and Equine

This publication provides identification of plants that are toxic to horses and symptoms of poisoning in equine

Ureteroscopic biopsy of upper tract urothelial carcinoma and role of urinary biomarkers

Ureteroscopic biopsy is an integral part of diagnosis of urothelial carcinoma of the upper urinary tract. It can be a technical challenge, but diagnostic rates have improved remarkably with refinements in surgical technique and specimen processing. Cytology aids with diagnosis and other urinary biomarkers continue to evolve, which may help further stratify patients for treatment. The current literature on the ureteroscopic biopsy and role of urinary biomarkers is reviewed and summarized below

A Social Network Study To Improve Collaborative Partnerships Among the Southeastern Health Equity Council (SHEC)

This report presents research conducted on the relationships among and attributes of members of the Southeastern Health Equity Council (SHEC, herein Council) to provide recommendations for partnerships, collaboration, and the recruitment of new members. The background, methods, results, and recommendations are outlined in detail throughout this report. Social networks are measured and defined as connections among people, organization, and/or other units. SNA is a valuable and innovative tool for recognizing strengths and weaknesses in collaborative partnerships. The evaluative study presented herein can be replicated in other councils within the Regional Health Equity Councils to improve collaborations not only among SHEC partnerships, but also the nine remaining regions as well. Among the SHEC, social networking models will be designed in an efforts to better understand partnerships, reach the desire goal to analyze partnerships among SHEC, and develop a better understanding of the broad-based constituency served by the Council for the purposes of improving collaborative partnerships

A focus on computer vision for non-contact monitoring of catalyst degradation and product formation kinetics

Chemists know the value of looking at a reaction for clues about reaction progress and success, but what-it-looks-like has never been quantified. Reid and co-workers (C. Yan, M. Cowie, C. Howcutt, K. M. P. Wheelhouse, N. S. Hodnett, M. Kollie, M. Gildea, M. H. Goodfellow and M. Reid, Chem. Sci., 2023, 14, 5323–5331, https://doi.org/10.1039/d2sc05702f) have developed an approach that uses camera footage of reactions to obtain quantitative descriptors of changes in reaction mixtures to support kinetic analysis

Required Levels of Catalysis for Emergence of Autocatalytic Sets in Models of Chemical Reaction Systems

The formation of a self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical network is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the origin of life. The question of whether such a network could form “by chance” within a sufficiently complex suite of molecules and reactions is one that we have investigated for a simple chemical reaction model based on polymer ligation and cleavage. In this paper, we extend this work in several further directions. In particular, we investigate in more detail the levels of catalysis required for a self-sustaining autocatalytic network to form. We study the size of chemical networks within which we might expect to find such an autocatalytic subset, and we extend the theoretical and computational analyses to models in which catalysis requires template matching