Telehealth Parity Laws - Ongoing Reforms Are Expanding the Landscape of Telehealth in the Us Health Care System, but Challenges Remain.

Despite the fact that no other developed country even comes close to the United States in annual spending on health care, 20 percent of Americans still live in areas where shortages of physicians and health care specialists exist, and the United States still ranks the lowest overall among eleven industrialized countries on measures of health system efficiency, access to care, equity, and healthy lives. Many believe that the answer to issues of cost and access in the US health system lies in telehealth, which increases access to care, alleviates travel costs and burdens, and allows more convenient treatment and chronic condition monitoring.With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the federal government announced the move toward encouraging and including telehealth services in health care coverage. The ACA, however, only implementedtelehealth at the federal level through Medicare, in selected circumstances; the power to determine which, if any, telehealth services is covered by Medicaid still remains largely within the powers of individual states.Also, states can govern private payer telehealth reimbursement policies. This means that telehealth implementation varies from state to state in terms of what services providers will be reimbursed for delivering, as well as what sort of "parity," defined as "equivalent treatment of analogous services," is expected between in-person health services reimbursements and telehealth reimbursements. This variation affects providers' ability to implement telehealth options, thereby reducing the patients' ability to use these services and become comfortable with the telehealth processes. Consequently, telehealth faces significant obstacles in becoming an accepted and used health care option for individuals, and states and the nation as a whole cannot fully realize the cost savings of telehealth

Signatures of disorder in the minimum conductivity of graphene

Graphene has been proposed as a promising material for future nanoelectronics because of its unique electronic properties. Understanding the scaling behavior of this new nanomaterial under common experimental conditions is of critical importance for developing graphene-based nanoscale devices. We present a comprehensive experimental and theoretical study on the influence of edge disorder and bulk disorder on the minimum conductivity of graphene ribbons. For the first time, we discovered a strong non-monotonic size scaling behavior featuring a peak and saturation minimum conductivity. Through extensive numerical simulations and analysis, we are able to attribute these features to the amount of edge and bulk disorder in graphene devices. This study elucidates the quantum transport mechanisms in realistic experimental graphene systems, which can be used as a guideline for designing graphene-based nanoscale devices with improved performance.Comment: Article: 14 pages, 4 figures. Supporting information: 8 pages, 3 figure

Tony Yang

A recent Stories of Andrews piece featured Tony Yang, our associate vice president for Marketing & Enrollment Management and chief marketing officer. See the ways God has moved in Tony’s life at andrews.edu/stories Andrea Luxtonhttps://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/stories-2019-summer/1000/thumbnail.jp

Eating and Exercise Detection with Continuous Glucose Monitors

Eating and exercise detection using continuous glucose monitor (CGM) signals is key to provide recommendations for a healthy lifestyle. However, this can be challenging given imbalanced data and other contexts. Previous works have used accelerometers, gyroscopes, glucose monitors, and other sensors but not necessarily all three plus others combined. Therefore, I aim to build a model by testing various techniques and testing glucose along with different statistical body measurements, such as electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc. A sliding window is used to extract statistical measures from each body measurement, such as standard deviation, mean, and range to look for patterns correlated to eating and exercise. I select an extreme gradient boosted decision tree algorithm with Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique. I compare the performance of just solely using glucose and then adding more sensory data and discovered that there is not consistent change in performance. I also adjusted the window and overlap to compare eating detection performance and found that there is not a concrete impact on the performance. Furthermore, I performed exercise detection and compare with and without CGM. There appears to be no significant performance difference with or without glucose. In addition to eating detection, I also examine for correlation between glucose variation and exercise moments. I finally conclude that it is not feasibly possible to detect eating with my current methods. However, for exercise detection, I can produce better detection results compared to eating, but my current method for detecting correlations between glucose levels and exercise moments can be later improved

Substrate Gating of Contact Resistance in Graphene Transistors

Metal contacts have been identified to be a key technological bottleneck for the realization of viable graphene electronics. Recently, it was observed that for structures that possess both a top and a bottom gate, the electron-hole conductance asymmetry can be modulated by the bottom gate. In this letter, we explain this observation by postulating the presence of an effective thin interfacial dielectric layer between the metal contact and the underlying graphene. Electrical results from quantum transport calculations accounting for this modified electrostatics corroborate well with the experimentally measured contact resistances. Our study indicates that the engineering of metal- graphene interface is a crucial step towards reducing the contact resistance for high performance graphene transistors.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Vector Bundle Extensions, Sheaf Cohomology, and the Heterotic Standard Model

Stable, holomorphic vector bundles are constructed on an torus fibered, non-simply connected Calabi-Yau threefold using the method of bundle extensions. Since the manifold is multiply connected, we work with equivariant bundles on the elliptically fibered covering space. The cohomology groups of the vector bundle, which yield the low energy spectrum, are computed using the Leray spectral sequence and fit the requirements of particle phenomenology. The physical properties of these vacua were discussed previously. In this paper, we systematically compute all relevant cohomology groups and explicitly prove the existence of the necessary vector bundle extensions. All mathematical details are explained in a pedagogical way, providing the technical framework for constructing heterotic standard model vacua.Comment: 62 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX. v2: references adde