The dark side of P4P

Examine the pitfalls of pay for performance and learn why some physicians and others are deeply concerned about the idea of incentive pay and fear it will have a negative impact on patient care.     

Konfliktcoaching einer Schulleiterin

Conflict-coaching of a headmistressThe author describes the process of conflict coaching. A newly appointed headmistress encountered a high conflict-potential when taking over this position. During the process of coaching appropriate strategies for conflict will be developed and necessary preparations will be made. As an extension of management-competencies the executive receives support from the coach.     

Charting a course toward legible medical records. Perfect paperwork can mean financial savings, better patient care.

Short of going fully electronic, there are various ways to clean up your medical record system to make it more efficient and less time-consuming. Check out how some experienced physician executives are dealing with this perennial problem.     

Contemporary Concerns in Family Therapy*

The literature indicates that recent clinical concerns concentrate on certain problem areas, while neglecting others. Theory building is slow; agreement on definition, indications, selection, evaluation, training programs, and a unifying conceptual schema is still lacking. Intervention and outcome evaluation remain insufficient. A need for broadness, flexibility, and avoidance of dogmatization is underlined. Resistance to a family and community intervention model continues. It is argued that strength rather than pathology needs emphasis. Some strategies to develop family therapy further are suggested and recommendations made to overcome outlined obstacles.     

Berry–Esseen type bounds for trimmed U-statistics

Trimmed U  -statistics can be constructed in two different ways: by basing the statistic on a trimmed sample or by averaging the trimmed set of kernel values. Mild conditions are given to ensure the rate of convergence to normality is O(n^-1/2)$\mathrm{O}(n^{-1/2})$ in both cases.     

QuickMMCTest: quick multiple Monte Carlo testing

Multiple hypothesis testing is widely used to evaluate scientific studies involving statistical tests. However, for many of these tests, p values are not available and are thus often approximated using Monte Carlo tests such as permutation tests or bootstrap tests. This article presents a simple algorithm based on Thompson Sampling to test multiple hypotheses. It works with arbitrary multiple testing procedures, in particular with step-up and step-down procedures. Its main feature is to sequentially allocate Monte Carlo effort, generating more Monte Carlo samples for tests whose decisions are so far less certain. A simulation study demonstrates that for a low computational effort, the new approach yields a higher power and a higher degree of reproducibility of its results than previously suggested methods.