Making Health Insurance Pro-poor: Lessons from 20 Developing Countries.

The last 20 years have seen a substantial growth in research on the extent to which health sector reforms are pro-poor or pro-rich. What has been missing is knowledge synthesis work to derive operational lessons from the empirical research. This article fills the gap for the most popular form of health financing reform, health insurance. Based on publications covering 20 developing countries, we find that health insurance is no panacea for improving equity in the health sector. More importantly, we find certain design elements of health insurance can increase the likelihood of tackling inequality in the health sector in developing countries.

Enforcing necessary non-negativity constraints for common diffusion MRI models using sum of squares programming.

In this work we investigate the use of sum of squares constraints for various diffusion-weighted MRI models, with a goal of enforcing strict, global non-negativity of the diffusion propagator. We formulate such constraints for the mean apparent propagator model and for spherical deconvolution, guaranteeing strict non-negativity of the corresponding diffusion propagators. For the cumulant expansion similar constraints cannot exist, and we instead derive a set of auxiliary constraints that are necessary but not sufficient to guarantee non-negativity. These constraints can all be verified and enforced at reasonable computational costs using semidefinite programming. By verifying our constraints on standard reconstructions of the different models, we show that currently used weak constraints are largely ineffective at ensuring non-negativity. We further show that if strict non-negativity is not enforced then estimated model parameters may suffer from significant errors, leading to serious inaccuracies in important derived quantities such as the main fiber orientations, mean kurtosis, etc. Finally, our experiments confirm that the observed constraint violations are mostly due to measurement noise, which is difficult to mitigate and suggests that properly constrained optimization should currently be considered the norm in many cases.

Study of Resistive-Type Superconducting Fault Current Limiters for a Hybrid High Voltage Direct Current System.

In this paper, a hybrid high voltage direct current transmission system containing a line commutated converter and a voltage source converter is developed. To enhance the robustness of the hybrid transmission system against direct current short-circuit faults, resistive-type superconducting fault current limiters are applied, and the effectiveness of this approach is assessed. Related mathematical models are built, and the theoretical functions of the proposed approach are expounded. According to the transient simulations in MATLAB software, the results demonstrate that: (i) The superconducting fault current limiter at the voltage source converter station enables to very efficiently mitigate the fault transients, and owns an enhanced current-limiting ability for handling the short-line faults. (ii) The superconducting fault current limiter at the line commutated converter station is able to mildly limit the fault current and alleviate the voltage drop, and its working performance has a low sensitivity to the fault location. At the end of the study, a brief scheme design of the resistive-type superconducting fault current limiters is achieved. In conclusion, the application feasibility of the proposed approach is well confirmed.

Design of a performance management program for a digestive endoscopy center / 中华医院管理杂志

This paper introduced the performance appraisal scheme for digestive endoscopy centers featuring centralized management. A comparison of the operations before and after the use of such performance management, proves the efficiency improvement of such centers, and the supplementary effect on centralized management of digestive endoscopies. Thus the authors propose that performance management is conducive to centralized management of the equipment for reference in designing performance management of departments.

Design and application of project teaching scheme in higher vocational nursing clinical cur-riculum / 中华医学教育探索杂志

Objective To explore the effect of designing and applying project teaching scheme in higher vocational nursing clinical curriculum. Methods Sophomores of nursing major in grade 2009 and 2010 were selected as experiment subjects. Lecture-based traditional teaching method was applied in tradition group (121 students in grade 2009) while project teaching was applied in reorga-nization group (128 students in grade 2010). The teaching method was evaluated through thoretical exam, vocational skill test, professional quality test and questionnaine surrey. Data were input by us-ing SPSS17.00. T-test and Ranksum test were applied. Results Vocational skill test results of tra-dition group and reorganization group were (76.67 ±13.072) and (85.48 ±10.085) respectively;professional quality test results were (74.77±13.865) and (87.04±8.982), respectively. Differences in both groups had statistical significances (P<0.001). Evaluation on the teaching method was carried out in both groups through a questionnaire. (716/1408) of students in reorganization group thought that project teaching can improve 11 items including comprehensive quality. Except for the item of the-oretical knowledge comprehension, the rest 10 items of both groups had statistical significances (P<0.001). Conclusion Implementation of project teaching in nursing clinical curriculum helps to im-prove students' professional core competence.