Federal employees health benefits program: discontinuance of health plan in an emergency. Final regulation

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is issuing a final rule to amend the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) regulations regarding discontinuance of a health plan to include situations in which a health plan becomes incapacitated, either temporarily or permanently, as the result of a disaster.     

Protecting Medicare services: trials of a peer review scheme

The Professional Services Review Scheme, established in 1994 under Pt VAA of the Health Insurance Act 1973 (Cth), is a unique attempt to apply peer standards to review of Medicare services. This article examines the evolution of the scheme in the light of extensive litigation.     

Health care in Canada: patterns of funding and regulation

During the 1970s the share of health care expenditure in Canadian GNP remained roughly stable, in the range of 7-71/2 percent of GNP, in marked contrast to its escalation in most other countries (the U.S. in particular) and to previous Canadian experience. The shift to a stable pattern coincided with the completion of the Canadian system of universal comprehensive public hospital and medical care insurance. This paper explores how and why the public insurance system served to contain cost escalation. It then discusses the inadequacy of expenditure experience per se as a basis for health system evaluation--the same data will support claims of both "underfunding" and "spiralling costs." More serious questions involve the influence of alternative patterns of health care funding and delivery on the effectiveness and efficiency of care provision, and the resulting distributional patterns of care and income. A brief sketch is given of the present situation and future possibilities of Canadian health care under these heads.     

A step towards improving workflow practices for volume crime investigations: outcomes of a 90-day trial in South Australia

The provision of forensic science services in volume crime investigations works most successfully as a partnership between police agencies and external forensic laboratories as opposed to a client/provider model where unlimited demand ignores finite resources. The principles of Lean Six Sigma have been applied in various laboratories to improve workflow through identification of wasteful work practices. These strategies are aimed at process optimisation through the application of triaging, a concept that has rarely been studied yet referenced strongly in the literature. The South Australia End to End 90-Day Trial: facilitating quicker justice through timely evidence processing, is a collaborative approach between South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia. This trial applied evidence-based policing principles, a law enforcement philosophy that uses research undertaken with scientific processes to inform law-enforcement decision-making. The results demonstrate how a review of processes and the removal of non-value adding activities can improve service delivery while not exhausting those ‘finite resources’.     

The role of private and public regulation in the case study of crypto-assets: The Italian move towards participatory regulation

With the Digital Financial package (MiCA, DLT Pilot, and DORA, later on complemented by the DAC8 proposal) the European Union seeks to establish an appropriate legal framework for crypto-assets showing a financial nature. The package represents a first attempt to regulate a complex and emerging phenomenon, characterised by significant trade-offs. Unsurprisingly, in this early stage of the law-making process several relevant aspects of the crypto environment remain unaddressed, such as pure DeFI models, DAOs, and NFTs. Such regulatory gap is to a large extent attributable to the difficulty of addressing technologically complex issues through command-and-control top-down legislation. The improvements delivered by the Better Regulation Agenda are not enough to solve this conundrum. In this context, the Communication by the Bank of Italy on Decentralised Technology in Finance and Crypto-assets and its first move, the smart-contract MoU, provide an interesting case study to discuss the potential of ‘participatory regulation.’ This experimental form of regulation tries to get the most out of co-regulation, self-regulation, and command-and-control, combining their characters with the view of reconciling the technology neutrality principle with technology-based regulation. Participatory regulation aims to bridge the public and private sector in order to strike a right balance between flexibility and legal certainty, without stifling innovation.     

Organization structure as a factor in innovation: A review of the literature

There are several approaches to the organization of an activity. Some of the better known methods are by function, project or a matrix. Each of these methods is investigated in terms of its effect on innovation. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed. All discussion is carefully supported by reference to current literature.     

A review of experimental design in forensic taphonomy: moving towards forensic realism

Forensic taphonomy as a discipline requires standardization to satisfy Daubert criteria for scientific data to be admissible in court. In response, there has been a shift towards quantification of methodology and estimating the postmortem interval. Despite these advances, there are still biases and limitations within the discipline not explicitly addressed in the early stages of experimental design nor in final published works. In this article, unresolved debates with respect to the conductance and reporting of forensic taphonomic research are reviewed, beginning with the nature of experimental cadavers, human or animal analogues and their body size, and second, the forensic realism of experimental setups, specifically with respect to caging, clothing and number of carcases. Pigs, albeit imperfect, are a good model to gain a general idea of the trends that may be seen in humans in subsequent validation studies in facilities where human donors are available. To date, there is no consensus among taphonomists on the extent of the effect that body mass has on decomposition progression. More research is required with both human cadavers and non-human analogues that builds on our current knowledge of forensic taphonomy to answer these nagging questions. This will enable the discipline to make the reliable assumption that pigs and donor decomposition data can be applied to homicide cases. A suite of experimental design aspects is suggested to ensure systematic and standardized data collection across different biogeoclimatic circumstances to identify and quantify the effects of potential confounding variables. Such studies in multiple, varied biogeographic circumstances with standardized protocols, equipment and carrion will facilitate independent global validation of patterns. These factors are reviewed to show the need for adjustments in experimental design to ensure relevance and applicability of data within locally realistic forensic situations. The initiation of a global decomposition data network for forensic taphonomists is recommended.

Key points

• Pigs are a valuable, albeit imperfect, proxy for human decomposition studies.
• There are few or conflicting data on effects of carcase size, carrion ecology, exclusion cages and scavengers.
• We recommend single, clothed, uncaged carcases for baseline research to reflect regionally specific forensic casework.