A Systems level characterization and tradespace evaluation of a simulated airborne fourier transform infrared spectrometer for gas detection

The remote sensing gas detection problem is one with no straightforward solution. While success has been achieved in detecting and identifying gases released from industrial stacks and other large plumes, the fugituve gas detection problem is far more complex. Fugitive gas represents a far smaller target and may be generated by leaking pipes, vents, or small scale chemical production. The nature of fugitive gas emission is such that one has no foreknowledge of the location, quantity, or transient rate of the targeted effluent which requires one to cover a broad area with high sensitivity. In such a scenario, a mobile airborne platform would be a likely candidate. Further, the spectrometer used for gas detection should be capable of rapid scan rates to prevent spatial and spectral smearing, while maintaining high resolution to aid in species identification. Often, insufficient signal to noise (SNR) prevents spectrometers from delivering useful results under such conditions. While common dispersive element spectrometers (DES) suffer from decreasing SNR with increasing spectral dispersion, Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS) generally do not and would seemingly be an ideal choice for such an application. FTS are ubiquitous in chemical laboratories and in use as ground based spectrometers, but have not become as pervasive in mobile applications. While FTS spectrometers would otherwise be ideal for high resolution rapid scanning in search of gaseous effluents, when conducted via a mobile platform the process of optical interferogram formation to form spectra is corrupted when the input signal is temporally unstable. This work seeks to explore the tradespace of an airborne Michelson based FTS in terms of modeling and characterizing the performance degradation over a variety of environmental and optical parameters. The major variables modeled and examined include: maximum optical path distance (resolution), scan rate, platform velocity, altitude, atmospheric and background emissivity variability, gas target parameters such as temperature, concentration-pathlength, confuser gas presence, and optical effects including apodization effects, single and double-sided interferograms, internal mirror positional accuracy errors, and primary mirror jitter effects. It is through an understanding of how each of the aforementioned variables impacts the gas detection performance that one can constrain design parameters in developing and engineering an FTS suitable to the airborne environment. The instrument model was compared to output from ground-based FTS instruments as well as airborne data taken from the Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (AHI) and found to be in good agreement. Monte Carlo studies were used to map the impact of the performance variables and unique detection algorithms, based on common detection scores, were used to quantify performance degradation. Scene-based scenarios were employed to evaluate performance of a scanning FTS under variable and complex conditions. It was found that despite critical sampling errors and rapidly varying radiance signals, while losing the ability to reproduce a radiometrically accurate spectrum, an FTS offered the unique ability to reproduce spectral evidence of a gas in scenarios where a dispersive element spectrometer (DES) might not

Health Care Cost Drivers and Options for Control

The growth of health care costs remains a serious concern in the United States. Slowing this growth involves understanding what drives health care costs and how to target those drivers effectively. In this brief, we review the relative importance of different health care cost drivers, including insurance benefits design, price inflation, provider incentives, technological growth, and inefficient system performance. We analyze the impact of these factors on the growth of health care spending in the last decade, which has been concentrated in hospitals and felt most acutely in the private market. We find that unit prices and technology remain the most important cost drivers of this recent growth. In reviewing public and private payer initiatives that target health care costs, we find that some have yielded modest results, but the evidence on most strategies is inconclusive or mixed. Designing and implementing effective interventions to slow cost growth remains a challenge, particularly in the privately insured market, where premiums have risen considerably in the last decade

What Is Affordable Health Care?

Although the “affordability” of health care is a common concern, the term is rarely defined. Fundamentally, affordability is a function of income, spending, and judgments about the value of goods and services for their price. This joint Penn LDI and United States of Care issue brief considers affordability as an economic concept, as a kitchen-table budget issue for individuals and families, and as a threshold in current policy. It reviews a range of measures that capture the cost burden for individuals and families with different forms of coverage, in different financial circumstances, and with different health concerns. By any measure, many Americans are experiencing significant problems due to health care costs, whether through high deductibles that discourage them from seeking health care, uninsurance or gaps in insurance benefits, or the less-noticed erosion of wages due to rising health insurance premiums. To transform affordability from an aspirational goal to a policy aim, policymakers will need to consider a number of key issues, including: the cost of care versus the cost of insurance, how to fairly distribute costs, consumers’ most salient affordability concerns, the root causes of financial barriers to care, and the differential impact of various policies on stakeholders

The Burden of Health Care Costs for Working Families

Growing concern about the affordability of health care and the cost burden imposed on working families frequently appears in public debate about the next phase of health care reform. In an earlier brief, Penn LDI and United States of Care reviewed national data on rising health care costs and different ways to measure whether health care and coverage are “affordable.” In this second briefof our affordability series, we adapt one of these measures to provide state-level data on the cost burden faced by working families who have employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). While not all working families have ESI, it is the most common form of health insurance in the United States. We examine how this burden varies across states, and how it has changed within states from 2010 to 2016

Opportunities for Precision Cancer: Reflections from the Gant Consortium

There is substantial interest in targeted cancer therapies, spurred by recent biomedical research in genomics and oncology. Targeted cancer therapies, in which prevention and treatment of cancer are based on genomic and biologic analyses, hold promise for cancer care. However, the rising costs of such therapies may threaten that promise. In an effort to meet the future challenges of targeted cancer medicine head-on, the University of Pennsylvania convened the Gant Family Precision Cancer Medicine Consortium, a multidisciplinary work group of experts from health care economics, policy, law, regulation, cancer research and medicine, patient advocacy, and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry. The Gant Consortium sought answers to a central question: what approaches should stakeholders take to foster the economic viability and sustainability of targeted cancer drugs? The Consortium literature review was conducted from August through November 2016. The expert committee met regularly from October 2016 to May 2017 to identify points of contention and consensus, outline the issues at the core of sustainable targeted cancer medicine, and inform potential policy recommendations. The literature presented in this report does not include therapies developed afterwards, such as CAR-T. The views expressed in this White Paper reflect the discussions of the Gant Consortium but do not necessarily represent the views of either any individual member or of the Consortium as a whole

Transforming Mental Health Care Through Implementation of Evidence-Based Practices

Changing clinical practice is hard, and changing practices within larger organizations is even harder. Increasingly, policymakers are looking to implementation science—the study of why some changes prove more durable than others—to understand the dynamics of successful transformation. In this brief, we summarize the results of an ongoing community-academicpartnership to increase the uptake of evidence-based practices in Philadelphia’s public behavioral health care system. Over five years, researchers found that widescale initiatives did successfully change the way care was delivered, albeit modestly and slowly. The evidence suggests that organizational factors, such as a proficient work culture, are more important than individual therapist factors, like openness in change, in influencing successful practice change. Furthermore, organizations must address staff turnover and burnout, and employees must feel supported in general in order for managers to expect them to change. In short, while practice transformation is possible—even in highly stressed and under-resourced public health settings—it requires focusing on underlying problems within organizations as well as championing new policies