22,673 research outputs found
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
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
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
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
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