Critical pathways: occupational therapists' role in development and utilization.

Managed care is mandating that healthcare facilities implement cost containment measures. Critical pathways are one popular tool used to meet this demand. The purpose of this study was to explore current involvement of occupational therapists (OTRs) in the use and creation of critical pathways. Results of a national survey showed 70.5% of the respondents reported they are not currently using critical pathways. A majority of OTRs are not and have not taken an active role in critical pathway development. Furthermore, the majority indicated having no knowledge of future critical pathway implementation in their facilities. Information gathered from those OTRs reporting critical path use included most common diagnoses using the paths and percentages of OTRs utilizing critical paths in specific occupational therapy areas. The conclusions drawn by the researchers indicated the need for OTRs to become more involved in the development and utilization of this multi-disciplinary approach to treatment. For OTRs to maintain and enhance their positions within the allied health profession, proactive involvement with these managed care driven quality assurance methods is essential.

Integration of competing ancillary assertions in genome assembly.

Assembly of genomic sequences and maps relies on a primary set of experimental data (e.g., the sequences of individual DNA fragments, or hybridization fingerprints of individual clone inserts), but almost always also relies on several streams of related but distinct kinds of data for completeness and accuracy of the final construction. These secondary data sets, which we term ancillary information, usually contain errors (as do the primary data sets, therefore creating the possibility of conflict between data sets), often arise from different experimental protocols and correspond to different scales of measurement, and occasionally include non-quantitative statements about the data. We present an approach for integration of ancillary assertions in the optimization of genome assembly, based on simultaneous balancing among the primary and secondary data sets, and include specific examples in the context of assembling DNA sequencing fragments to reconstruct a parent sequence.

Artificially generated data sets for testing DNA sequence assembly algorithms.

We have developed a set of tools, genfrag, to fragment and optionally mutate a DNA sequence to generate benchmark data sets for testing DNA sequence assembly algorithms. Data parameters can be systematically and independently varied to explore the range of data--and corresponding performance of assembly tools--encountered on large-scale random, or "shot-gun," sequencing projects.