Persian writing system, like all other Arabic script-based languages, is special because of omiss... more Persian writing system, like all other Arabic script-based languages, is special because of omission of some vowels in its standard orthography. Lack of these vowels causes some problems in Text -To-Speech systems because full transcription of words is needed for synthesis. Then construction of a Letter-To-Sound conversion system is necessary for Text-To-Speech systems because it is not possible to list all words of a language with their corresponding pronunciation in a lexicon. In this paper, we have presented a Persian Letter-To-Sound conversion system based on Classification and Regression Tree. The training data is a lexicon of 32,000 words with their corresponding pronunciation which is extracted from Persian linguistic database corpora. The CART is built with Wagon that is a tool of Edinburg Speech Tools for constructing decision trees in Festival. The final accuracy of this system is 93.61 %, which means that this system is able to predict Persian words' pronunciation comparatively by a high accuracy in comparison with the same system for English which is 94.6% accurate to predict English words' pronunciation in Festival. Also accuracy of the implemented Persian Letter-To-Sound system in festival is more than other previous systems which are implemented out of Festival.
Chronic bronchitis is the most frequent late respiratory disease among Iranians exposed to mustar... more Chronic bronchitis is the most frequent late respiratory disease among Iranians exposed to mustard gas during the Iraq-Iran war. The aim of this study was to investigate efficacy of oral and intravenous corticosteroid therapy in improving lung function in mustard gas induced chronic bronchitis patients. 65 mustard gas-exposed chronic bronchitis patients, who were not responsive to standard treatments in exacerbation occasions, were randomly divided into two groups: an intravenous group (39 patients) receiving 500 mg intravenous methylprednisolone daily, and an oral group (26 patients) receiving 1 mg/kg oral prednisolone daily. Corticosteroid was tapered over the study period in both groups. Spirometery was performed on admission and on day 8 of therapy for assessment of effectiveness of therapy. There was significant improvement in spirometery indexes of both groups in approximately half of the patients over the study period. Furthermore, there was no difference between the pulse corticosteroid versus oral corticosteroid therapy in these patients. Since short-term corticosteroid therapy has a significant effect on lung function of almost fifty percent of patients with mustard gas-induced chronic bronchitis in exacerbation occasions, we suggest a short-term bolus steroid treatment to triage the patients into responders and non-responders for subsequent treatment.
American Journal of Economics and Business Administration, 2011
Problem statement: In modern age, the service quality and sensitivity towards better qualified se... more Problem statement: In modern age, the service quality and sensitivity towards better qualified service are among the priorities of the global community. Quality is defined as the customer's desire and the customer's perceptions and expectations constitute the key factor determining quality. The issue of quality is particularly important in healthcare service. Nowadays, alongside the human, financial and economic capitals, a new form of capital entitled social capital is being utilized. Social capital may influence the service quality. Facilitating science and improving team work and organizational commitment would probably translate into better quality of products and social capital encompasses all these issues. Approach: This is a cross-sectional, descriptive-analytic study conducted in educational hospitals of Tabriz, Iran in 2010. The target community consists of workers working in educational hospitals of Tabriz and patients referring to these hospitals. A total of 320 workers and 320 patients were selected for the study. Our data collection tool consisted of two questionnaires which were distributed among the participants after their validity and reliability were established. Once the questionnaires were completed, the statistical coefficients relating to the types of variables (t-test, Pearson correlation coefficient and analysis of variance) were calculated and analyzed using SPSS software version 16. Results: Our findings indicate that there is a significant, positive relationship between organizational social capital and the service quality from the patients' point of view, with the correlation between the two variables on a strong level (r = 0.6, p<0.001). Regression analysis results indicate that the five dimensions of social capital account for 0.88% of the variance in service quality equation and the variable relationship among workers in social networks is the most influential factor on service quality in the study population; this factor accounts for 0.59% of the variation in service quality. Conclusion: The existence of a significant relationship between the dimensions of social capital and service quality highlights the importance of social capital of workers in the organization.
To assess the effects on hospital utilization rates of a major health system reform - a family ph... more To assess the effects on hospital utilization rates of a major health system reform - a family physician programme and a social protection scheme - undertaken in rural areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2005. A &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;tracer&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; province that was not a patient referral hub was selected for the collection of monthly hospitalization data over a period of about 10 years, beginning two years before the rural health system reform (the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;intervention&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;) began. An interrupted time series analysis was conducted and segmented regression analysis was used to assess the immediate and gradual effects of the intervention on hospitalization rates in an intervention group composed of rural residents and a comparison group composed of urban residents primarily. Before the intervention, the hospitalization rate in the rural population was significantly lower than in the comparison group. Although there was no significant increase or decline in hospitalization rates in the intervention or comparison group before the intervention, after the intervention a significant increase in the hospitalization rate - of 4.6 hospitalizations per 100 000 insured persons per month on average - was noted in the intervention group (P &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt; 0.001). The monthly increase in the hospitalization rate continued for over a year and stabilized thereafter. No increase in the hospitalization rate was observed in the comparison group. The primary health-care programme instituted as part of the health system reform process has increased access to hospital care in a population that formerly underutilized hospital services. It has not reduced hospitalizations or hospitalization-related expenditure.
Inappropriate payments by insurance organizations or third party payers occur because of errors, ... more Inappropriate payments by insurance organizations or third party payers occur because of errors, abuse and fraud. The scale of this problem is large enough to make it a priority issue for health systems. Traditional methods of detecting health care fraud and abuse are time-consuming and inefficient. Combining automated methods and statistical knowledge lead to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary branch of science that is named Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD). Data mining is a core of the KDD process. Data mining can help third-party payers such as health insurance organizations to extract useful information from thousands of claims and identify a smaller subset of the claims or claimants for further assessment. We reviewed studies that performed data mining techniques for detecting health care fraud and abuse, using supervised and unsupervised data mining approaches. Most available studies have focused on algorithmic data mining without an emphasis on or application to fraud detection efforts in the context of health service provision or health insurance policy. More studies are needed to connect sound and evidence-based diagnosis and treatment approaches toward fraudulent or abusive behaviors. Ultimately, based on available studies, we recommend seven general steps to data mining of health care claims.
Persian writing system, like all other Arabic script-based languages, is special because of omiss... more Persian writing system, like all other Arabic script-based languages, is special because of omission of some vowels in its standard orthography. Lack of these vowels causes some problems in Text -To-Speech systems because full transcription of words is needed for synthesis. Then construction of a Letter-To-Sound conversion system is necessary for Text-To-Speech systems because it is not possible to list all words of a language with their corresponding pronunciation in a lexicon. In this paper, we have presented a Persian Letter-To-Sound conversion system based on Classification and Regression Tree. The training data is a lexicon of 32,000 words with their corresponding pronunciation which is extracted from Persian linguistic database corpora. The CART is built with Wagon that is a tool of Edinburg Speech Tools for constructing decision trees in Festival. The final accuracy of this system is 93.61 %, which means that this system is able to predict Persian words' pronunciation comparatively by a high accuracy in comparison with the same system for English which is 94.6% accurate to predict English words' pronunciation in Festival. Also accuracy of the implemented Persian Letter-To-Sound system in festival is more than other previous systems which are implemented out of Festival.
Chronic bronchitis is the most frequent late respiratory disease among Iranians exposed to mustar... more Chronic bronchitis is the most frequent late respiratory disease among Iranians exposed to mustard gas during the Iraq-Iran war. The aim of this study was to investigate efficacy of oral and intravenous corticosteroid therapy in improving lung function in mustard gas induced chronic bronchitis patients. 65 mustard gas-exposed chronic bronchitis patients, who were not responsive to standard treatments in exacerbation occasions, were randomly divided into two groups: an intravenous group (39 patients) receiving 500 mg intravenous methylprednisolone daily, and an oral group (26 patients) receiving 1 mg/kg oral prednisolone daily. Corticosteroid was tapered over the study period in both groups. Spirometery was performed on admission and on day 8 of therapy for assessment of effectiveness of therapy. There was significant improvement in spirometery indexes of both groups in approximately half of the patients over the study period. Furthermore, there was no difference between the pulse corticosteroid versus oral corticosteroid therapy in these patients. Since short-term corticosteroid therapy has a significant effect on lung function of almost fifty percent of patients with mustard gas-induced chronic bronchitis in exacerbation occasions, we suggest a short-term bolus steroid treatment to triage the patients into responders and non-responders for subsequent treatment.
American Journal of Economics and Business Administration, 2011
Problem statement: In modern age, the service quality and sensitivity towards better qualified se... more Problem statement: In modern age, the service quality and sensitivity towards better qualified service are among the priorities of the global community. Quality is defined as the customer's desire and the customer's perceptions and expectations constitute the key factor determining quality. The issue of quality is particularly important in healthcare service. Nowadays, alongside the human, financial and economic capitals, a new form of capital entitled social capital is being utilized. Social capital may influence the service quality. Facilitating science and improving team work and organizational commitment would probably translate into better quality of products and social capital encompasses all these issues. Approach: This is a cross-sectional, descriptive-analytic study conducted in educational hospitals of Tabriz, Iran in 2010. The target community consists of workers working in educational hospitals of Tabriz and patients referring to these hospitals. A total of 320 workers and 320 patients were selected for the study. Our data collection tool consisted of two questionnaires which were distributed among the participants after their validity and reliability were established. Once the questionnaires were completed, the statistical coefficients relating to the types of variables (t-test, Pearson correlation coefficient and analysis of variance) were calculated and analyzed using SPSS software version 16. Results: Our findings indicate that there is a significant, positive relationship between organizational social capital and the service quality from the patients' point of view, with the correlation between the two variables on a strong level (r = 0.6, p<0.001). Regression analysis results indicate that the five dimensions of social capital account for 0.88% of the variance in service quality equation and the variable relationship among workers in social networks is the most influential factor on service quality in the study population; this factor accounts for 0.59% of the variation in service quality. Conclusion: The existence of a significant relationship between the dimensions of social capital and service quality highlights the importance of social capital of workers in the organization.
To assess the effects on hospital utilization rates of a major health system reform - a family ph... more To assess the effects on hospital utilization rates of a major health system reform - a family physician programme and a social protection scheme - undertaken in rural areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2005. A &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;tracer&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; province that was not a patient referral hub was selected for the collection of monthly hospitalization data over a period of about 10 years, beginning two years before the rural health system reform (the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;intervention&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;) began. An interrupted time series analysis was conducted and segmented regression analysis was used to assess the immediate and gradual effects of the intervention on hospitalization rates in an intervention group composed of rural residents and a comparison group composed of urban residents primarily. Before the intervention, the hospitalization rate in the rural population was significantly lower than in the comparison group. Although there was no significant increase or decline in hospitalization rates in the intervention or comparison group before the intervention, after the intervention a significant increase in the hospitalization rate - of 4.6 hospitalizations per 100 000 insured persons per month on average - was noted in the intervention group (P &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt; 0.001). The monthly increase in the hospitalization rate continued for over a year and stabilized thereafter. No increase in the hospitalization rate was observed in the comparison group. The primary health-care programme instituted as part of the health system reform process has increased access to hospital care in a population that formerly underutilized hospital services. It has not reduced hospitalizations or hospitalization-related expenditure.
Inappropriate payments by insurance organizations or third party payers occur because of errors, ... more Inappropriate payments by insurance organizations or third party payers occur because of errors, abuse and fraud. The scale of this problem is large enough to make it a priority issue for health systems. Traditional methods of detecting health care fraud and abuse are time-consuming and inefficient. Combining automated methods and statistical knowledge lead to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary branch of science that is named Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD). Data mining is a core of the KDD process. Data mining can help third-party payers such as health insurance organizations to extract useful information from thousands of claims and identify a smaller subset of the claims or claimants for further assessment. We reviewed studies that performed data mining techniques for detecting health care fraud and abuse, using supervised and unsupervised data mining approaches. Most available studies have focused on algorithmic data mining without an emphasis on or application to fraud detection efforts in the context of health service provision or health insurance policy. More studies are needed to connect sound and evidence-based diagnosis and treatment approaches toward fraudulent or abusive behaviors. Ultimately, based on available studies, we recommend seven general steps to data mining of health care claims.
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Papers by Mohamad Arab