Patient Self-worth and Communication Barriers to Trust of Israeli Patients in Acute-Care Physicians at Public General Hospitals.

Patient trust is positively related to health outcomes, but there remain barriers to patient trust in physicians. This narrative study analyzed patient experiences and highlights barriers to patient trust underlying communication with physicians in acute care. Snowball sampling was used.

Impulse response function analysis of the impacts of hospital accreditations on hospital efficiency.

Improving hospital efficiency is an emerging area of interest among policy makers in the new global economy's healthcare system. To ensure accurate efficiency analyses, we consider the nonhomogeneous input/output characteristics of various hospital departments, particularly the Department of Medicine, Department of Surgery, and Department of Other Specialist Medicine. These departments employ co-inputs to produce nonhomogeneous outputs.

The use of analytic hierarchy process for measuring the complexity of medical diagnosis.

Diagnostic complexity is an important contextual factor affecting a variety of medical outcomes. Existing measurements of diagnosis complexity either rely on crude proxies or use fine-grained measures that employ indicators from proprietary data that are not readily available. Hence, the study of this important construct in fields such as medical informatics has been hampered by the difficulty of measuring diagnostic complexity.

Exploring trajectories of emergency department visits using a laboratory-based indicator of serious illness.

Repeated emergency department visits have become a serious challenge worldwide. Despite prior research indicating that laboratory results may provide early alerts about such patients on their upcoming adverse events, few studies have examined their role as a critical indicator of the stability of a patient's medical condition over time. We model and analyze the developmental trajectories of patients' creatinine levels, a key laboratory marker of serious illness, as a potential risk stratification mechanism across many emergency department visits.

The Complexity and Entropy Analysis for Service Game Model Based on Different Expectations and Optimal Pricing.

The internet has provided a new means for manufacturers to reach consumers. On the background of the widespread multichannel sales in China, based on a literature review of the service game and multichannel supply chain, this paper builds a multichannel dynamic service game model where the retailer operates an offline channel and the manufacturer operates an online channel and offers customers the option to buy online and pick up from the retailer's store (BOPS). The manufacturer and the retailer take maximizing the channel profits as their business objectives and make channel service game under optimal pricing.

Top-Down Prioritization of Salient Items May Produce the So-Called Stimulus-Driven Capture.

The current study proposes that top-down attentional prioritization of salient items may produce the so-called stimulus-driven capture. To test this proposal, the "" was designed on the basis of a visual search task. In Experiment 1, a task-irrelevant singleton frame was presented at the same location in 70% of the trials.

Can automaticity be verified utilizing a perceptual load manipulation?

A variety of studies tried to examine the fundamental question of whether specific processing is "automatic," that is, occurs without attention, by manipulating attention toward stimuli via the set-size manipulation of perceptual load. The present paper invites re-extermination of this common methodology of altering the perceptual load of a relevant task to manipulate attention toward peripheral stimuli. Four main arguments that propose alternative interpretations to the notion of automaticity in this line of studies are discussed, suggesting that automaticity cannot be verified utilizing manipulation of load, and outlining a plan for moving forward.

Gender differences in job quality and job satisfaction among doctors in rural western China.

Background: Few studies about gender differences in job quality and job satisfaction among medical professionals have been carried out in China. So the objectives of this study were to examine whether and to what extent gender differences existed in job quality and job satisfaction of doctors in rural western China.

Methods: From 2009 to 2011, a total of 1472 doctors from 103 selected county-level health care facilities in rural western China were recruited into the study.

"I Swear I Will Never Betray You": Factors Reported by Spouses as Helping Them Resist Extramarital Sex in Relation to Gender, Marriage Length, and Religiosity.

Studies suggest that married people frequently engage in intimate relationships with people other than their spouses, and the literature has extensively examined motives for doing so. However, less is known about what factors prevent spouses from engaging in extramarital sex. While investment theory, interdependence theory, and moral theories offer insights into this question, they have not been subject to much empirical research.

Facebook's Contribution to Well-being among Adolescent and Young Adults as a Function of Mental Resilience.

Studies of correlations between general internet use and psychological well-being have shown mixed results. The present study aimed to elucidate the relationship between Facebook use and psychological well-being, with mental resilience expected to moderate the relationship. Two hundred Israeli adolescents and young adults completed questionnaires assessing their Facebook use, mental resilience, and psychological well-being.

Attention and memory protection: Interactions between retrospective attention cueing and interference.

Visual working memory (VWM) and attention have a number of features in common, but despite extensive research it is still unclear how the two interact. Can focused attention improve VWM precision? Can it protect VWM from interference? Here we used a partial-report, continuous-response orientation memory task to examine how attention and interference affect different aspects of VWM and how they interact with one another. Both attention and interference were orthogonally manipulated during the retention interval.

Is there time discounting for risk premium?

Individuals with a higher subjective discount rate concentrate more on the present and delay is more significant for them. However, when a risky asset is delayed, not only is the outcome delayed but also the risk. In this paper, we suggest a new, two-stage experimental method with real monetary incentives that allows us to distinguish between the effect of the risk and the effect of the time when pricing a risky asset.

Sweet sixteen: changing time preferences in the transition from middle school to high school, for different scenarios.

Teenagers earn, save and spend large amounts of money. Therefore, understanding teenagers' time preference and how it affects their economic behavior is very important. The current study investigates time preferences of high school and middle school students, and the effect of different intertemporal choice scenarios on teenagers' subjective discount rate.

Effects of the National Essential Medicine System in reducing drug prices: an empirical study in four Chinese provinces.

Objectives: The rapid increase in drug expenditure has become a major source of public criticism in China. In 2009, the National Essential Medicine System (NEMS) was launched in China to control drug prices and improve access to medicines. This study investigated whether and to what extent the prices of essential medicines were reduced after the introduction of NEMS.

Between Jewish settlers and Palestinian citizens of Israel: negotiating ethno-national power relations through the discourse of PTSD.

This article traces a critical change in the professional implementation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the broadening of its use from an apolitical sign of psychopathology, to an interpretative framework in which clinical questions of diagnosis and treatment intersect with political questions of ethno-national power relations. The aid discourse of a new NGO--the "Israeli Trauma Coalition" (ITC)--serves as my case study. I analyze how the experts negotiated similar clinical questions, associated with a single biomedical idiom, PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations: the "Disengagement Plan" (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks.

Using electronic health record systems to optimize admission decisions: the Creatinine case study.

Many medical organizations have implemented electronic health record (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks to improve medical decision-making. This study evaluated the contribution of EHR and HIE networks to physicians by investigating whether health information technology can lead to more efficient admission decisions by reducing redundant admissions in the stressful environment of emergency. Log-files were retrieved from an integrative and interoperable EHR that serves seven main Israeli hospitals.

Low level perceptual, not attentional, processes modulate distractor interference in high perceptual load displays: evidence from neglect/extinction.

According to perceptual load theory (Lavie, 2005) distractor interference is determined by the availability of attentional resources. If target processing does not exhaust resources (with low perceptual load) distractor processing will take place resulting in interference with a primary task; however, when target processing uses-up attentional capacity (with high perceptual load) interference can be avoided. An alternative account (Tsal and Benoni, 2010a) suggests that perceptual load effects can be based on distractor dilution by the mere presence of additional neutral items in high-load displays so that the effect is not driven by the amount of attention resources required for target processing.

Ignoring irrelevant stimuli in latent inhibition and Stroop paradigms: the effects of schizotypy and gender.

Latent inhibition (LI), poor evidence of learning following preexposure to a task-irrelevant stimulus, reflects the ability to ignore inconsequential events. Stroop interference represents a failure to inhibit processing of a task-irrelevant word when it is incongruent with the required naming of the word's print color. The apparent commonality between the two effects is in contradiction to the literature, which indicates that LI is affected by schizotypy and schizophrenia, and perhaps gender, while Stroop interference generated by the trial-to-trial procedure is unaltered by those variables.

An internet-based simulation system for training and development of regional-healthcare-centers managers.

RHCMS (Regional Healthcare Center Management System) is an Internet-based simulation training system for Regional Healthcare-Centers (RHCs) managers. The system is based on an integrative model, designed and developed by an interdisciplinary team of experts, for the purpose of training and developing RHCs' managers. This model involves the study of the following fields: healthcare management, business administration, organizational behavior, health economics, management science, and information technologies.

Equilibrium distribution of permeants in polyelectrolyte microcapsules filled with negatively charged polyelectrolyte: the influence of ionic strength and solvent polarity.

The effects of ionic strength and solvent polarity on the equilibrium distribution of fluorescein (FL) and FITC-dextran between the interior of polyelectrolyte multilayer microcapsules filled with negatively charged strong polyelectrolyte and the bulk solution were systematically investigated. A negatively charged strong polyelectrolyte, poly(styrene sulfonate) (PSS), used for CaCO3 core fabrication, was entrapped inside the capsules. Due to the semipermeability of the capsule wall, a Donnan equilibrium between the inner solution within the capsules and the bulk solution was created.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients display enhanced latent inhibition on a visual search task.

Latent inhibition (LI) is a phenomenon that reflects the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli. LI is attenuated in some schizophrenic patient groups and in high schizotypal normal participants. One study has found enhanced LI in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD [Swerdlow, N.