Search

Academic medical centers that develop managed care networks may find they are not dealing with a conventional business. Instead, the result is a complex entity with multiple decision makers who do not regard success in monetary terms alone. Duke University Hospital is one example of an academic managed care network. In the past, academic medical centers gave a lot of autonomy to individual departments and faculty to make decisions about programs and finances. The national move toward health care reform may curtail such autonomy, requiring instead more accountability and standardization of costs and care. The creators of an academic managed care network at Duke University addressed such issues and came up with a combination of specialty care in the academic medical center, and less costly care in physicians' offices. The Duke group has a separate organization that buys physicians' practices. This ensures that referrals to the medical center will continue. Formerly proprietary financial information has been made public throughout the medical center in an effort to identify and correct areas of excessive cost.

The article discusses how departmental chairs in medical colleges can manage entrepreneurial faculty members. It says that department chairs must find ways on how faculty members can dedicate time for research and entrepreneurial activities, creating an environment that is conducive for both the traditional research faculty and entrepreneurial faculty. The department chairs must also create a place for an entrepreneur within an academic setting for a long time.

Presents information on the development of a computer assisted educational tool for multidisciplinary education in geriatrics and aging (MEGA). Student's preference for MEGA to written text; Revision of MEGA to make it more interactive and flexible.

The rat model is used to verify disulfiram-associated hypercholesterolemia and to determine a mechanism of action. Administration of disulfiram 15 mg/kg/day for 3 wk is associated with a 25% increase in serum cholesterol which is reversible with discontinuance of the drug. The hypercholesterolemia is due in part to a fourfold increase in activity of hepatic HMG-CoA reductase, the rate-limiting step in cholesterol biosyntheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find that localized rotations of hexagonal clusters of particles occur during rapid dissolution of grain boundary loops in two-dimensional colloidal crystals. These particle vortices, or rotating "granules," are distinct from established models for grain boundary diffusion, which predict that a crystal grain enclosed within another crystal will dissolve at a constant rate. Our measurements of colloidal crystal experiments and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal grain boundary motion that is described by two distinct processes: slow dissolution due to the diffusion of individual particles, and rapid dissolution due to collective granule rotation. In the latter process, hexagonal clusters of particles rotate together in granules whose shape and position are determined by the underlying moiré pattern. Furthermore, these vortices guide cooperative strings of particles that move along the edges of the hexagonal granules. Including this vortex mechanism may improve models for grain coarsening in polycrystalline materials, ultimately offering improved predictions for the time evolution of material properties.