Does IT Spending Matter on Hospital Financial Performance and Quality?

This research explored impacts of IT spending on hospital financial performance and hospital quality. We developed two research hypotheses accordingly. The first hypothesis was that IT spending would be positively related to the hospital financial performance, and the second hypothesis was that hospitals with higher IT spending would have better quality metrics. We used the 2017 American Hospital Association Survey data and the HCAHPS dataset from Medicare website. We tested three hospital financials and three quality measures. We employed T-Tests and ANOVA models to test the hypotheses. Results were inconclusive for both hypotheses. Evidence showed statistical significance on two out of seven tests

An Unconditional War on Poverty: Action and Reaction

Christopher Greeley and Robert Sanborn\u27s introduction to Volume 7, Issue 1: 50 Years After the War on Poverty: Historic Victories and New Challenges

The Future of Our Children

Christopher Greeley and Robert Sanborn\u27s introduction to Volume 7, Issue 2: The Critical Years: Research and Progress in Early Education and Early Brain Development

Implications for Immigrant Child Health: Creating Evidence-Based Practice in a Changing Environment

Executive Editors, Dr. Robert Sanborn and Dr. Christopher Greeley, discuss the implications of research presented in the Journal of Applied Research on Children 10 (1) regarding the well being of immigrant children

The strategic use and potential demand for an HIV vaccine in Southern Africa

HIV prevalence in Southern Africa is the highest in the world and the impact of HIV/AIDS in the region are devastating at all levels of society, including the wider economy. Government response has lagged behind the pace of the epidemic, but programs are now beginning to focus on a broad range of interventions to combat its further spread and to mitigate its impact. The authors investigate the issues around the targeting of an eventual HIV vaccine. There is at present no vaccine against HIV. Although several candidates are in the trial stage, it is not likely that a vaccine effective against the sub-type of the virus prevalent in Southern Africa will be available for 10-15 years. When it is, it may be expensive, only partially effective, and confer immunity for a limited period only. Vaccination programs will need to make the best use of the vaccine that is available and effective targeting will be essential. The authors identify potential target groups for a vaccine, and estimate how many individuals would be in need of vaccination. They develop a method for estimating how many cases of HIV infection are likely to be avoided for each vaccinated individual. The cases avoided are of two kinds: primary-the individual case that might have occurred in people who are vaccinated, and secondary-the number of people that the vaccinated individual would otherwise have caused to become infected. Both ofthese depend on assumptions about the efficacy and duration of vaccine protection and the extent and nature of sexual risk behavior in the population groups. The authors distinguish between the HIV cases averted per vaccination and the cases averted per 100 recruits into a vaccination program. The cases averted per 100 recruits is used to develop a priority ranking of the identified population groups for vaccination. The authors discuss the issue of ease of access to those groups and how the differential costs would affect the vaccination strategy. They conclude that an expensive vaccine should be administered to commercial sex workers first, while an inexpensive vaccine would be better administered first to general population groups, in particular, schoolchildren. The authors conclude with a discussion of current levels of public and private expenditure on HIV prevention and treatment, and the implications for an assessment of the willingness to pay for an eventual HIV vaccine.Disease Control&Prevention,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,HIV AIDS,Public Health Promotion,Early Child and Children's Health,Adolescent Health,Health Economics&Finance,HIV AIDS and Business,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,HIV AIDS

The Methodology of Normative Policy Analysis

Policy analyses frequently clash. Their disagreements stem from many sources, including models, empirical estimates, and values such as who should have standing and how different criteria should be weighted. We provide a simple taxonomy of disagreement, identifying distinct categories within both the positive and values domains of normative policy analysis. Using disagreements in climate policy to illustrate, we demonstrate how illuminating the structure of disagreement helps to clarify the way forward. We conclude by suggesting a structure for policy analysis that can facilitate assessment, comparison, and debate by laying bare the most likely sources of disagreement.

Re-Assessing the U.S. Quality Adjustment to Computer Prices: The Role of Durability and Changing Software

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). In this paper we suggest a new reason why conventional hedonic methods may overstate the price decline of personal computers. We model computers as a durable good and suppose that software changes over time, which influences the efficiency of a computer. Anticipating future increases in software, purchasers may “overbuy” characteristics, in the sense that the purchased bundle of characteristics is not fully utilized in the first months or year that a computer is owned. In this case, we argue that hedonic procedures do not provide valid bounds on the true price of computer services at the time the machine is purchased with the concurrent level of software. To assess these theoretical results we estimate the model and find that before 2000 the hedonic price index constructed with BLS methods overstates the fall in computer prices. After 2000, however, the BLS hedonic index falls more slowly, reflecting the reduced marginal cost of acquiring (and therefore marginal benefit to users) of characteristics such as RAM, hard disk space or speed.industrial

Factor analysis modelling for speaker verification with short utterances

This paper examines combining both relevance MAP and subspace speaker adaptation processes to train GMM speaker models for use in speaker verification systems with a particular focus on short utterance lengths. The subspace speaker adaptation method involves developing a speaker GMM mean supervector as the sum of a speaker-independent prior distribution and a speaker dependent offset constrained to lie within a low-rank subspace, and has been shown to provide improvements in accuracy over ordinary relevance MAP when the amount of training data is limited. It is shown through testing on NIST SRE data that combining the two processes provides speaker models which lead to modest improvements in verification accuracy for limited data situations, in addition to improving the performance of the speaker verification system when a larger amount of available training data is available