Patient Power and Empowerment: Mitigating Elements of Valuable Patient Participation in Healthcare Collaboratives.

During the last decade, the public healthcare sector has had to deal with increased competition, a growing influence of patient associations, and a necessity to deliver health services more efficiently and effectively. Despite recognising the patient participant's role as a critical stakeholder in value creation, there is a limited body of research on the influence and power of patient participants. This article focuses on regional health improvement collaboratives that aim to develop coordinated, multi-stakeholder solutions to their healthcare cost and quality problems.

Spatial analysis and visualization of global data on multi-resolution hexagonal grids.

In this article, computation for the purpose of spatial visualization is presented in the context of understanding the variability in global environmental processes. Here, we generate synthetic but realistic global data sets and input them into computational algorithms that have a visualization capability; we call this a simulation-visualization system. Visualization is key here, because the algorithms which we are evaluating must respect the spatial structure of the input.

Focusing attention on objects of interest using multiple matched filters.

In order to be of use to scientists, large image databases need to be analyzed to create a catalog of the objects of interest. One approach is to apply a multiple tiered search algorithm that uses reduction techniques of increasing computational complexity to select the desired objects from the database. The first tier of this type of algorithm, often called a focus of attention (FOA) algorithm, selects candidate regions from the image data and passes them to the next tier of the algorithm.

Profile of HIV seropositive inmates diagnosed in Maryland's state correctional system.

Correctional systems increasingly serve as the health care nexus for the initial diagnosis and treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, particularly among traditionally underserved populations. A survey was conducted to describe the clinical profile of inmates in a State correctional system diagnosed with HIV infection by various testing strategies. Approximately 50 percent of the inmates diagnosed were potential candidates for anti-retroviral therapy, and 17 percent were severely immunocompromised.