Autonomy in consumer choice.

We propose that autonomy is a crucial aspect of consumer choice. We offer a definition that situates autonomy among related constructs in philosophy and psychology, contrast actual with perceived autonomy in consumer contexts, examine the resilience of perceived autonomy, and sketch out an agenda for research into the role of perceived autonomy in an evolving marketplace increasingly characterized by automation.

Calibrating Gompertz in reverse: What is your longevity-risk-adjusted global age?

This paper develops a computational framework for inverting Gompertz-Makeham mortality hazard rates, consistent with compensation laws of mortality for heterogeneous populations, to define a (L-RaG) age. To illustrate its salience and possible applications, the paper calibrates and presents L-RaG values using country data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD). Among other things, the author demonstrates that when properly benchmarked, the age of a 55-year-old Swedish male is 48, whereas a 55-year-old Russian male is closer in age to 67.

Fostering Clinical Research in the Community Hospital: Opportunities and Best Practices.

With potential to improve patient outcomes, quality of care and cost-effectiveness, clinical research activity in community hospitals has recently begun to increase. Recognizing that establishing or strengthening a clinical research program in this setting is an important, complex and challenging undertaking, this article introduces many of the resources, best practices and success stories that community hospitals can draw upon to develop and incentivize clinical researchers, operationalize the clinical research enterprise and make clinical research impactful.

Dual pathways to bias: Evaluators' ideology and ressentiment independently predict racial discrimination in hiring contexts.

Despite organizations' professed commitment to fairness, thousands of employees file race-based discrimination claims every year. The current article examines how people deviate from impartiality when evaluating candidates in hiring decisions. Researchers have argued the ideological endorsement of elitism (i.

Associations Between End-of-Life Expenditures and Hospice Stay Length Vary by Clinical Condition and Expenditure Duration.

Objectives: Hospice use reduces costly aggressive end-of-life (EOL) care (eg, repeated hospitalizations, intensive care unit care, and emergency department visits). Nevertheless, associations between hospice stays and EOL expenditures in prior research have been inconsistent. We examined the differential associations between hospice stay duration and EOL expenditures among newly diagnosed patients with cancer, congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and dementia.

Trends in Provision of Palliative Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy Among Hospices in the United States, 2011-2018.

This case series study uses Medicare 2011-2019 Hospice Cost Report Data to analyze trends in the proportion of freestanding hospices in the United States providing radiotherapy and chemotherapy, as well as the expenses incurred for providing these therapies.

The importance of evaluating the complete automated knowledge-based planning pipeline.

We determine how prediction methods combine with optimization methods in two-stage knowledge-based planning (KBP) pipelines to produce radiation therapy treatment plans. We trained two dose prediction methods, a generative adversarial network (GAN) and a random forest (RF) with the same 130 treatment plans. The models were applied to 87 out-of-sample patients to create two sets of predicted dose distributions that were used as input to two optimization models.

Values-in-action that support safe production.

Introduction: Safe production is a sustainable approach to managing an organization's operations that considers the interests of both management and workers as salient stakeholders in a productive and safe workplace. A supportive culture enacts values versus only espousing them. These values-in-action are beliefs shared by both management and workers that align what should happen in performing organizational routines to be safe and be productive with what actually is done.

Thinking of You: How Second-Person Pronouns Shape Cultural Success.

Why do some cultural items succeed and others fail? Some scholars have argued that one function of the narrative arts is to facilitate feelings of social connection. If this is true, cultural items that activate personal connections should be more successful. The present research tested this possibility in the context of second-person pronouns.

Knowledge-based automated planning with three-dimensional generative adversarial networks.

Purpose: To develop a knowledge-based automated planning pipeline that generates treatment plans without feature engineering, using deep neural network architectures for predicting three-dimensional (3D) dose.

Methods: Our knowledge-based automated planning (KBAP) pipeline consisted of a knowledge-based planning (KBP) method that predicts dose for a contoured computed tomography (CT) image followed by two optimization models that learn objective function weights and generate fluence-based plans, respectively. We developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN)-based KBP approach, a 3D GAN model, which predicts dose for the full 3D CT image at once and accounts for correlations between adjacent CT slices.

"You Are Beautiful, No Matter What They Say": Applying An Evidence-Based Approach To Body Image Law.

Israeli and French Governments passed Body Image Laws that require models to have a minimum BMI or be of a healthy weight and if an image was modified to make the model appear thinner, it must have a warning. Are these laws merely symbolic, to focus a spotlight on this issue, or can they too have an impact? This article analyses some of the criticisms of the Body Image Laws by applying existing evidence from health research. Ultimately, it argues that there are many flaws with the Body Image Laws and that such a law should not be passed in Australia.

Racial Differences in Health Care Transitions and Hospice Use at the End of Life.

Although the fragmentation of end-of-life care has been well documented, previous research has not examined racial and ethnic differences in transitions in care and hospice use at the end of life. Retrospective cohort study among 649,477 Medicare beneficiaries who died between July 2011 and December 2011. Sankey diagrams and heatmaps to visualize the health care transitions across race/ethnic groups.

Factors Associated With Hospices' Nonparticipation in Medicare's Hospice Compare Public Reporting Program.

Background: To enhance the quality of hospice care and to facilitate consumers' choices, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began the Hospice Quality Reporting Program, in which CMS posted the quality measures of participating hospices on its reporting website, Hospice Compare. Little is known about the participation rate and the types of nonparticipating hospices.

Objective: To examine the factors associated with hospices' nonparticipation in Hospice Compare.

Stimulating Research and Development of New Antibiotics While Ensuring Sustainable Use and Access: Further Insights from the DRIVE-AB Project and Others.

Global discussions are ongoing on how to stimulate antibiotic research and development in order to provide patients with new antibiotics able to address the challenges of antimicrobial resistance. In this supplement, we present nine articles derived from the research performed as part of the Innovative Medicine Initiative-funded DRIVE-AB project and others. These publications provide new evidence and arguments in the debate around economic incentives to stimulate antibiotic innovation, including characteristics, implementation and governance.

Individual movements and contact patterns in a Canadian long-term care facility.

Contact networks of individuals in healthcare facilities are poorly understood, largely due to the lack of spatio-temporal movement data. A better understanding of such networks of interactions can help improve disease control strategies for nosocomial outbreaks. We sought to determine the spatio-temporal patterns of interactions between individuals using movement data collected in the largest veterans long-term care facility in Canada.

Regional Practice Patterns and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Intensity of End-of-Life Care.

Objective: To examine whether regional practice patterns impact racial/ethnic differences in intensity of end-of-life care for cancer decedents.

Data Sources: The linked Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare database.

Study Design: We classified hospital referral regions (HRRs) based on mean 6-month end-of-life care expenditures, which represented regional practice patterns.

Strategic planning in an academic radiation medicine program.

Background: In this paper, we report on the process of strategic planning in the Radiation Medicine Program (rmp) at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. The rmp conducted a strategic planning exercise to ensure that program priorities reflect the current health care environment, enable nimble responses to the increasing burden of cancer, and guide program operations until 2020.

Methods: Data collection was guided by a project charter that outlined the project goal and the roles and responsibilities of all participants.

Trauma resuscitation: can team behaviours in the prearrival period predict resuscitation performance?

Background: Optimising team performance is critical in paediatric trauma resuscitation. Previous studies in aviation and surgery link performance to behaviours in the prearrival period.

Objective: To determine if patterns of human behaviour in the prearrival period of a simulated trauma resuscitation is predictive of resuscitation performance.

Inventory management of reusable surgical supplies.

We investigate the inventory management practices for reusable surgical instruments that must be sterilized between uses. We study a hospital that outsources their sterilization services and model the inventory process as a discrete-time Markov chain. We present two base-stock inventory models, one that considers stockout-based substitution and one that does not.

Longer Periods Of Hospice Service Associated With Lower End-Of-Life Spending In Regions With High Expenditures.

Hospice use is expected to decrease end-of-life expenditures, yet evidence for its financial impact remains inconclusive. One potential explanation is that the use of hospice may produce differential cost-savings effects by region because of geographic variation in end-of-life spending patterns. We examined 103,745 elderly Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program Medicare database who died from cancer in 2004-11.

Liquidity and volatility commonality in the Canadian stock market.

This paper studies liquidity and volatility commonality in the Canadian stock market. We show that five various liquidity measures display strong evidence of commonality at both market-wide and industry specific levels. Our findings extend the results of previous studies in liquidity commonality, and show that even after controlling for individual determinants of liquidity such as price, volume, and volatility, liquidity commonality remains.

Chest CT scans are frequently abnormal in asymptomatic patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia.

Chest computed tomography (CT) findings of nodules, ground glass opacities, and consolidations are often interpreted as representing invasive fungal infection in individuals with febrile neutropenia. We assessed whether these CT findings were present in asymptomatic individuals with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) at low risk of invasive fungal disease. A retrospective study of consecutive asymptomatic adult patients with newly diagnosed AML over a 2-year period was performed at a tertiary care oncology center.

Association between Time since Cancer Diagnosis and Health-Related Quality of Life: A Population-Level Analysis.

Objectives: To examine the association between time since cancer diagnosis and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among cancer survivors in remission.

Methods: Analyzing data from 3,610 cancer survivors and 59,539 individuals without cancer in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we examined the relationship between time since cancer diagnosis and HRQOL, taking remission status into account and controlling for patients' demographic characteristics and comorbidities. HRQOL measurements included the six-dimensional health state short form (derived from 36-item short form health survey) (SF-6D) utility scores, the physical component summary score, and the mental component summary score.

Organizational Behavior: A Brief Overview and Safety Orientation.

Organizational Behavior (OB) is a discipline of social science that seeks explanations for human behavior in organizations. OB draws on core disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, communication, and law to create and investigate multilevel explanations of why people engage in particular behaviors, and which behaviors under which circumstances lead to better outcomes in organizations. Created using an applied or pragmatic lens and tested with a wide range of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, most OB theories and research have direct implications for managers and for other organizational participants.

Cardiac resuscitation events: one eyewitness is not enough.

Objective: To determine the accuracy of paper cardiopulmonary resuscitation records.

Design: Case series.

Setting: Twenty-six-bed video-monitored pediatric cardiac ICU.