ACR Accreditation for Utah Valley Hospital’s Radiation Oncology Center

Becoming an accredited clinic through the American College of Radiology (ACR) and their Radiation Oncology Practice Accreditation (ROPA) program will provide third-party evaluation of patient care to ensure the best treatment possible for patients. Talk of getting ACR accreditation has occurred in the past for Utah Valley Hospital/American Fork Hospital, but at the time it was seen as something that did not provide sufficient value vs. the cost. The recent One Intermountain restructuring is intended to unify all of the Intermountain Healthcare radiation oncology centers in Utah so the Radiation Oncology Director has set the goal that all Intermountain radiation oncology programs will be accredited. Intermountain Medical Center (IMC) and Dixie Regional Medical Center (DRMC) are currently ACR accredited and can be used as model programs. I started with an in-depth examination of our department’s workflow, documentation, and policies in order to determine where improvements to meet ACR accreditation standards could be made. I followed this up by working on implementing some of these improvements throughout the clinic and made sure they become routine and a standard in the department. An analysis of Dixie Regional Medical Center and Intermountain Medical Center’s ACR documents was performed to provide a baseline of an accredited-ACR program. Finally, a comprehensive checklist of everything that will need to be changed or implemented was presented in order to provide guidance for the future

Reducing Able-bodied Entitlement: The Effects of Education, Privilege Acknowledgment, and Inter-group Contact

Too often, socially privileged individuals act in ways that display entitlement, ignorance, or disregard for marginalized people, even when they are educated about the dynamics of oppression and privilege. Because education alone may not be sufficient to reduce prejudices held by the privileged, it is necessary to determine which additional factors most effectively motivate privileged individuals to embody support for the marginalized in their everyday actions. One such factor identified as influential in the cultivation of inter-group harmony is inter-group contact. In this research, I focus on able-bodied people and their sense of entitlement to their surroundings; specifically, I examine whether meaningful inter-group contact between people with disabilities and able-bodied people who have been educated about disability issues and who acknowledge their able-bodied privilege affects their appropriation of amenities designed for people who use mobility devices. My findings have implications for policies and programs: initiatives that incorporate both educational and interactional components are better equipped to foster disabilityfriendly climates than are single-axis approaches

Analysis of Break-Points in Financial Time Series

A time series is a set of random values collected at equal time intervals; this randomness makes these types of series not easy to predict because the structure of the series may change at any time. As discussed in previous research, the structure of time series may change at any time due to the change in mean and/or variance of the series. Consequently, based on this structure, it is wise not to assume that these series are stationary. This paper, discusses, a method of analyzing time series by considering the entire series non-stationary, assuming there is random change in unconditional mean and variance of the series. Specifically, this paper emphasizes financial time series. The main goal in this process is to break the series into small locally stationary time series on which stationary assumption applies. The most interesting part of this procedure is locating the break-points, where the unconditional mean and/or variance of the series change. After having found what the break-points are, we divide the series into smaller series according to the break points; the number of break-points determines how many small stationary time series we have. The analysis by this method considers each interval on which the series is stationary as an independent time series with its specific parameters. Hence, the overall time series that is naturally nonstationary is broken into small stationary time series that are easier to analyze. Afterwards, by using Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) we are comparing the local stationary model to the model considering the entire series stationary. In a simulation study with known sample size, unconditional means and variances, for each small stationary series, the result shows that we can locate the exact true break-points when the sample size is greater than 500. After our simulation study, this method is also applied to the real data, S&P 500 series of returns, which is a financial time series. The results obtained by using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) show that BIC is smaller for the locally stationary model