While it is the ongoing growth in healthcare spending that has been making headlines, improving and maintaining healthcare quality is a critical goal of healthcare policy. In this dissertation I answer three questions relating to healthcare quality: does physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare quality; how physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare...
Services have been constantly evolving and operational efficiency has been a key initiative for progress. In this collection of academic papers, we investigate the efficiency of three different industry practices, to each of which we dedicate a chapter. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 cover completed research, while the research covered...
Vegetation in dryland environments is often patchy in response to water limitation. This patchiness can take the form of periodic patterning at length scales much larger than that of an individual plant. Instances of patterns resembling leopard spots and tiger stripes are widespread in dry regions of Africa, Australia, and...
Makerspaces have become explosively popular in recent years. Many believe they hold promise as contexts for integrated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) learning, meta-disciplinary skill learning, and promoting interest and equity in STEAM. However, we still know relatively about what is actually learned in these spaces, how interest...
Online platforms for learning to code such as Coursera, CodeCademy, and CodeSchool attract millions of learners and significantly expand the pool of self-starting developers, yet critical gaps in knowledge and experience remain between inexperienced learners and professionals. With vast amounts of professionally-authored source code made readily available by the client-server...
In this thesis I develop and apply techniques to the masses and eccentricities of tran-siting exoplanets from their transit timing variations. These techniques include both analytic and numerical means for measuring planet masses and orbits and assessing the robustness of the inferred properties. I apply these techniques to a sample...
Over the last 20 years a new field of amorphous transparent conducting oxides (a-TCOs) has developed. The amorphous nature of these films makes them well suited for large area applications. In addition, a-TCOs can be made at low temperatures and through solution processing methods. These assets provide promising opportunities to...
Evidence-Based Behavioral Practice (EBBP) is a transdisciplinary systematic approach that emphasizes the use of best evidence in combination with clinical expertise, as well as patient preferences and values, to make clinically-informed decisions about care and treatment (Spring, 2007). Despite numerous benefits and strong policy support of EBBP, findings indicate that...
Smartphone is becoming ubiquitous and its sales proportions have exceeded the sales of personal computer systems since 2012. The number of smartphones will increase and perhaps at an even higher rate in the coming years. The computational capacity and numerous mobile applications benefit end user's daily life. At the same...