Previous observational research confirms abundant variation in primary care practice. While variation is sometimes viewed as problematic, its presence may also be highly informative in uncovering ways to enhance health care delivery when it represents unique adaptations to the values and needs of people within the practice and interactions with the local community and health care system. We describe a theoretical perspective for use in developing interventions to improve care that acknowledges the uniqueness of primary care practices and encourages flexibility in the form of intervention implementation, while maintaining fidelity to its essential functions.

Previous observational research confirms abundant variation in primary care practice. While variation is sometimes viewed as problematic, its presence may also be highly informative in uncovering ways to enhance health care delivery when it represents unique adaptations to the values and needs of people within the practice and interactions with the local community and health care system. We describe a theoretical perspective for use in developing interventions to improve care that acknowledges the uniqueness of primary care practices and encourages flexibility in the form of intervention implementation, while maintaining fidelity to its essential functions.

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Advances in wireless and optical communication, as well as in Internet multicast protocols, make broadcast and multicast methods an effective solution to disseminate data. In particular, repetitive server-initiated broadcast is an effective technique in wireless systems and is a scalable solution to relieve Internet hot spots. A critical issue for the performance of multicast data dissemination is the multicast schedule. Previous work focused on a model where each data item is requested by clients with a certain probability that is independent of past accesses. In this paper, we consider the more complex scenario where a client accesses pages in blocks (e.g., a HTML file and all its embedded images), thereby introducing dependencies in the pattern of accesses to data. We present a sequence of heuristics that exploit page access dependencies. We measured the resulting client-perceived delay on multiple Web server traces, and observed an average speed-up over previous methods ranging from 8% to 91%. We conclude that scheduling for multi-item requests is a critical factor for the performance of repetitive broadcast.

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation scheme for networked control systems that have their control loops closed over a geographically distributed network. We first formulate the bandwidth allocation as a convex optimization problem. We then present an allocation scheme that solves this optimization problem in a fully distributed manner. In addition to being fully distributed, the proposed scheme is asynchronous, scalable, dynamic and flexible. We further discuss mechanisms to enhance the performance of the allocation scheme. We present analytical and simulation results.

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