Designing Effective Health Care Quality Transparency Initiatives

Profiles two well-designed healthcare quality transparency initiatives from California and Massachusetts. Examines key design and implementation elements, including provider engagement, reliable data, consumer-friendliness, and feedback to providers

Financial and Health Burdens of Chronic Conditions Grow

Points to rising rates of chronic conditions and obesity; growing numbers of patients with problems paying medical bills, even with insurance; and contributing factors such as declining private coverage and delays in accessing care. Outlines implications

Striking Jump in Consumers Seeking Health Care Information

Examines shifts in how Americans seek health information from sources other than their doctors. Looks at growing Internet use and information-seeking for others, education as a factor, and the impact of information-seeking on perceptions of health issues

Word of Mouth and Physician Referrals Still Drive Health Care Provider Choice

Examines how consumers choose physicians, specialists, or medical facilities, including the use of physician referrals, word-of-mouth recommendations, health plan information, and the Internet. Explores implications for consumer-directed health care

Limited Options to Manage Specialty Drug Spending

Outlines rising trends in costs of and spending on specialty drugs; health plans' efforts to curb specialty drug spending, including patient cost sharing and utilization management; and efforts to integrate medical and pharmaceutical coverage

Checking Up on Retail-Based Health Clinics: Is the Boom Ending?

Outlines trends in the growth of retail-based clinics providing basic care at pharmacies and other retail settings. Examines who uses them, where, for what services, and why; insurance coverage and reimbursement rates; and variations in state regulation

Workplace Clinics: A Sign of Growing Employer Interest in Wellness

Examines the increasing employer demand for workplace clinics, clinic management models, types of services, challenges, regulations, and the clinics' potential impact, including their ability to raise productivity and help contain healthcare costs

Old Techniques for New Join Algorithms: A Case Study in RDF Processing

Recently there has been significant interest around designing specialized RDF engines, as traditional query processing mechanisms incur orders of magnitude performance gaps on many RDF workloads. At the same time researchers have released new worst-case optimal join algorithms which can be asymptotically better than the join algorithms in traditional engines. In this paper we apply worst-case optimal join algorithms to a standard RDF workload, the LUBM benchmark, for the first time. We do so using two worst-case optimal engines: (1) LogicBlox, a commercial database engine, and (2) EmptyHeaded, our prototype research engine with enhanced worst-case optimal join algorithms. We show that without any added optimizations both LogicBlox and EmptyHeaded outperform two state-of-the-art specialized RDF engines, RDF-3X and TripleBit, by up to 6x on cyclic join queries-the queries where traditional optimizers are suboptimal. On the remaining, less complex queries in the LUBM benchmark, we show that three classic query optimization techniques enable EmptyHeaded to compete with RDF engines, even when there is no asymptotic advantage to the worst-case optimal approach. We validate that our design has merit as EmptyHeaded outperforms MonetDB by three orders of magnitude and LogicBlox by two orders of magnitude, while remaining within an order of magnitude of RDF-3X and TripleBit