Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Searching For The Fulcrum: Can Accountable Care Organizations Lower Spending By Balancing Specialists-To-Primary Care Providers?, Vishal Shetty

Masters Theses

Background:

While value-based payment models emphasizing care coordination have been widely implemented to improve quality and lower expenditures, supporting empirical evidence is sparse. Our objective was to quantify the impact of specialist-to-primary care physician involvement within accountable care organization (ACO) and its association with lower spending.

Methods:

We conducted a retrospective cohort study of Medicare Shared Savings Program ACOs from 2012-2016 using publicly available data provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the ACO level. We examined the association between the proportion of primary care services delivered by specialists versus other types of care providers and ACO …

A Study On Modelling Spatial-Temporal Human Mobility Patterns For Improving Personalized Weather Warning, Yue Xu

Masters Theses

Understanding human mobility patterns is important for severe weather warning since these patterns can help identify where people are in time and in space when flash floods, tornados, high winds and hurricanes are occurring or are predicted to occur. A GIS (Geographic Information Science) data model was proposed to describe the spatial-temporal human activity. Based on this model, a metric was designed to represent the spatial-temporal activity intensity of human mobility, and an index was generated to quantitatively describe the change in human activities. By analyzing high-resolution human mobility data, the paper verified that human daily mobility patterns could be …