Maximizing Kids' Enrollment in Medicaid and SCHIP

Reviews the 2006 report "Seven Steps Toward State Success in Covering Children Continuously" and recommends the most effective state strategies for increasing enrollment and retention of children in Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Programs

Paving the Way to Simpler: Experiencing from Maximizing Enrollment States in Streamlining Eligibility and Enrollment

Since 2009, the eight states (Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin) participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Maximizing Enrollment program have worked to streamline and simplify enrollment systems, policies, and processes for children and those eligible for health coverage in 2014. The participating states aimed to reduce enrollment barriers for consumers and administrative burdens in processing applications and renewals for staff by making improvements and simplifications at every step of the enrollment process. Although the states began their work before the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), their efforts positioned them well for implementation in 2014, and offer experiences and lessons that other states may find useful in their efforts to improve efficiency, lower costs, and promote responsible stewardship of limited public resources

Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale for older people: psychometric testing and short form development with a three country sample

Aim To develop and psychometrically test Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale for older people and to reduce the scale to a more practical short form. Background The Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale is the only available and validated scale measuring patients\u27 perceived readiness just prior to discharge. Design Secondary analysis of hospital studies data from three countries. Method Data were collected between 2008–2012. The study sample comprised 998 medical-surgical older patients. Factor analysis was undertaken to identify the factor structure of the Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale. Group comparisons for construct validity and predictive validity for readmission were also conducted. Results The Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale original four factor solution does not appear to be consistent with the observed data of older people in the three countries. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that a 17-item scale with three factors produced the best model fit. Nine items, three from each factor, loaded consistently on their respective factors in each country sample. Confirmatory factor analysis of this short form model indicated that the model adequately fit the data. Patients who lived alone, were older, or who indicated ‘not ready’ for discharge had lower Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale for Older People scores, which were also associated with readmission risk. Conclusion The revised three factor structure of the Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale for Older People in long and short forms more adequately assesses core components of discharge readiness in the older adult population than the original adult form

Using Data to Drive State Improvement in Enrollment and Retention Performance

Outlines the RWJF Maximizing Enrollment program's core performance measures for Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program enrollment and retention, designed to assess state efforts to better utilize data to monitor and improve outreach and policy

Disconnect Between Literature and Libraries: The Availability of Mentoring Programs for Academic Librarians

Our goal in this study was to determine the likelihood that a recent graduate entering his or her first professional position or a transitioning librarian would have access to formal mentoring programs. The study suggests that, while formal mentoring is valuable, more emphasis needs to be focused on creating formal mentoring programs to make them more widely available

Wind prediction enhancement by exploiting data non-stationarity

The short term forecasting of wind speed and direction has previously been improved by adopting a cyclo-stationary multichannel linear prediction approach which incorporat ed seasonal cycles into the estimation of statistics. This pap er expands previous analysis by also incorporating diurnal va ri- ation and time-dependent window lengths. Based on a large data set from the UK’s Met Office, we demonstrate the impact of this proposed approach

Short-term forecasting of wind speed and direction exploiting data non-stationarity

This paper explores how the accuracy of short-term prediction of wind speed and direction can be enhanced by considering the diurnal variation of the wind. The wind speed and direction are modelled as the magnitude and phase of a complex-valued time series. The prediction is performed by a multichannel filter using the spatio-temporal correlation between measurements at different geographical locations and the past values of the target site. A multichannel complex-valued non-stationary prediction Wiener filter is proposed that takes into account both the seasonal and diurnal variation of the wind. Using hourly wind speed and direction measurements from over 22 Met Office weather stations distributed across the UK, we demonstrate that there can be a benefit for predicting one hour ahead when taking into account the diurnal and seasonal cyclo-stationary nature of the wind