Association of a Bundled-Payment Program With Cost and Outcomes in Full-Cycle Breast Cancer Care.

Importance: Value-driven payment system reform is a potential tool for aligning economic incentives with the improvement of quality and efficiency of health care and containment of cost. Such a payment system has not been researched satisfactorily in full-cycle cancer care.

Objective: To examine the association of outcomes and medical expenditures with a bundled-payment pay-for-performance program for breast cancer in Taiwan compared with a fee-for-service (FFS) program.

Using Hamming Distance as Information for SNP-Sets Clustering and Testing in Disease Association Studies.

The availability of high-throughput genomic data has led to several challenges in recent genetic association studies, including the large number of genetic variants that must be considered and the computational complexity in statistical analyses. Tackling these problems with a marker-set study such as SNP-set analysis can be an efficient solution. To construct SNP-sets, we first propose a clustering algorithm, which employs Hamming distance to measure the similarity between strings of SNP genotypes and evaluates whether the given SNPs or SNP-sets should be clustered.

Bayesian random effects for interrater and test-retest reliability with nested clinical observations.

Objective: The assessment of inter- and intrarater reliability usually involves more than one level of nesting structures in the collected data, where repeated observations are made by multiple raters. Most approaches, however, are not designed to accommodate both inter- and intrarater reliability jointly, not to mention further difficulties arising when modeling with dichotomous responses. The multiple sources of dependence because of nesting structures and the existence of covariates can result in complexity in inference.