Answer: Astigmatism
Explanation: I have it, lol
A Drug Trend report published in 2009 had predicted continued price increase among traditional branded and biotech drugs that lack generic competition. Now, further, CMS has reduced its Average Sales price (ASP) margin from 6 percent to 4 percent for non-pass-thorough. This has affected pharmacy reimbursement. However, there are certain other aspects of Pharmacy Billing that can affect reimbursement and thereby the Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) process if not well implemented.
1. Data Workflow:
Recognizing how the revenue cycle works in pharmacy is very essential. Procurement to Inventory, billing and reimbursement involves purchase of medications, their storage, and method of dispensing, how they are administered, way they are coded & billed, and finally reimbursed. If the drug is covered as a pharmacy benefit, or the payer needs that to be obtained via a specialty pharmacy as identified through patient-specific benefit verification, then here both the provider and the pharmacy are part of the reimbursement process. The physician writes a prescription and orders the drug. This is followed by the pharmacy that fills the order and issues the drug to the physician, CMHC, or hospital outpatient department. Here the pharmacy bills the insurance company for the drug. If any information is entered incorrectly into the pharmacy system in the initial phase of the cycle, errors can prove to be costly, impacting aspects of clinical and revenue cycle.
2. Procurement:
During this phase information is converted from purchased quantities and pricing to storage units of measure (UOM) and inventory costs. Manually entering the data is followed in most cases. UOM conversions, when data is uploaded from the wholesale distributor to the pharmacy system, are also checked and verified manually. Here too mistakes can lead to breakdown in the revenue cycle management (RCM) process.
3. The Charge master:
Critical & substantial revenue leakage can occur when separately reimbursable medications are either missing from or miscoded in the charge master. Conversion of pharmaceutical quantities is a must from purchased amounts to patient-administered amounts, and only then made billable. There is often a difference between dosage amounts required for patient use as from that purchased. Besides inventory, the clinician and pharmacist should convert dosage, strength, and delivery mechanism for each drug. Drug data must be correctly converted from the quantities residing in clinical systems into the payer-billable quantities appropriate for the financial system or charge master. The UOMs must be reconciled to avoid any under- or over-payments. More than often, missing or incorrect data in the charge master can result in negative financial consequences – denied claims, partial reimbursement, and compliance risks.
4. Linkages between Purchases & Billing:
Most hospitals have separate processes to order drugs, administer them, and process reimbursement. Without linkage between pharmacy expenditures for medications (i.e., spend data) and the charge master, ensuring proper charge capture and optimal reimbursement is a challenge. Besides hospitals should have automated tools to identify charge capture errors precisely, so as to pinpoint when and where their occurrence to decreasing revenue loss.
Recombinant DNA (rDNA), or molecular cloning, is the process by which a single gene, or segment of DNA, is isolated and amplified. ... A cloning vector is a DNA molecule that carries foreign DNA into a host cell, where it replicates, producing many copies of itself along with the foreign DNA.
Answer:
Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a technique to make many copies of a specific DNA region in vitro (in a test tube rather than an organism).
PCR relies on a thermostable DNA polymerase, Taq polymerase, and requires DNA primers designed specifically for the DNA region of interest.
In PCR, the reaction is repeatedly cycled through a series of temperature changes, which allow many copies of the target region to be produced.
PCR has many research and practical applications. It is routinely used in DNA cloning, medical diagnostics, and forensic analysis of DNA.
PCR:
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a common laboratory technique used to make many copies (millions or billions!) of a particular region of DNA. This DNA region can be anything the experimenter is interested in. For example, it might be a gene whose function a researcher wants to understand, or a genetic marker used by forensic scientists to match crime scene DNA with suspects.
Typically, the goal of PCR is to make enough of the target DNA region that it can be analyzed or used in some other way. For instance, DNA amplified by PCR may be sent for sequencing, visualized by gel electrophoresis, or cloned into a plasmid for further experiments.
PCR is used in many areas of biology and medicine, including molecular biology research, medical diagnostics, and even some branches of ecology.
Answer:
I believe that the best answer to the question: Is there enough evidence to conclude that alcohol and depression are related? Would be: there is enough evidence to show a level of correlation between the two variables, but not enough to show that one leads necessarily to the other, or what is known as a causal relation.
Explanation:
The intent for this survey performed by Gallup was to establish the relationship that existed between alcohol consumption and depression, especially clinical depression, given that previous data shows that there is a relationship between the two. However, the survey failed in establishing the causal relationship between the two because of the questions it used. In the first case, the questions only led to know if the people in the sample could be classified as non-drinkers, moderate drinkers and heavy drinkers. These questions established then the presence, or absence of alcoholic consumption. The second set of questions tested to see if people had ever, in their lives, been diagnosed with clinical depression, which yielded just two options: yes, and no. The answers that would come from the questions, and the results extracted from the two sets of questions manage to show that either the two variables: alcoholism and depression, appear together, or not at all, or there may be the appearance of one, without that of the other. Therefore, in the end, what the survey manages is to establish a statistical probability of correlation, but not necessarily responds the question of the researchers: that there is in fact, a causal relationship between the two variables, as the survey does not prove that depression necessarily leads to alcohol consumption.
