Drug innovation, prices and health

This article tries to reconcile economic-industrial policy with health policy when dealing with biomedical innovation and welfare state sustainability. Better health accounts for an increasingly large proportion of welfare improvements. Explanation is given to the welfare losses coming from the fact than industrial and health policy tend to ignore each other. Drug s prices reflecting their relative relative effectiveness send the right signal to the industry rewarding innovation with impact on quantity and quality of life- and to the buyers of health care services.The level of drug s public reimbursement indicates the social willingness to pay of the different national health systems, not only by means of inclusion, or rejection, in the basket of services covered, but especially establishing the proportion of the price that is going to be financed publicly.Reference pricing for therapeutic equivalents as the upper limit of the social willingness to pay- and two-tiered co-payments for users (avoidable and inversely related with the incremental effectiveness of de drug) are deemed appropriate for those countries concerned at the same time with increasing their productivity and maintaining its welfare state. Profits drive R&D but not its location. There is no intrinsic contradiction between high productivity and a consolidated National Health Service (welfare state) as the European Nordic Countries are telling us every day.

A general multiserver state-dependent queueing system

The work studies a general multiserver queue in which the service time of an arriving customer and the next interarrival period may depend on both the current waiting time and the server assigned to the arriving customer. Stability of the system is proved under general assumptions on the predetermined distributions describing the model. The proof exploits a combination of the Markov property of the workload process with a regenerative property of the process. The key idea leading to stability is a characterization of the limit behavior of the forward renewal process generated by regenerations. Extensions of the basic model are also studied.

On Cooperative solutions of a generalized assignment game: limit theorems to the set of competitive equilibria

We study two cooperative solutions of a market with indivisible goods modeled as a generalized assignment game: Set-wise stability and Core. We first establish that the Set-wise stable set is contained in the Core and it contains the non-empty set of competitive equilibrium payoffs. We then state and prove three limit results for replicated markets. First, the sequence of Cores of replicated markets converges to the set of competitive equilibrium payoffs when the number of replicas tends to infinity. Second, the Set-wise stable set of a two-fold replicated market already coincides with the set of competitive equilibrium payoffs. Third, for any number of replicas there is a market with a Core payoff that is not a competitive equilibrium payoff.

Developing and evaluating a pictogram-based Instant Messaging service for individuals with cognitive disabilities

Information and communication technologies pose accessibility problems to people with disabilities because its design fails to take into account their communication and usability requirements. The impossibility to access the services provided by these technologies creates a situation of exclusion that reduces the self-suficiency of disabled individuals and causes social isolation, which in turn diminishes their overall quality of life. Considering the importance of these technologies and services in our society, we have developed a pictogram-based Instant Messaging service for individuals with cognitive disabilities who have reading and writing problems. Along the paper we introduce and discuss the User Centred Design methodology that we have used to develop and evaluate the pictogram-based Instant Messaging service and client with individuals with cognitive disabilities taking into account their communication and usability requirements. From the results obtained in the evaluation process we can state that individuals with cognitive disabilities have been able to use the pictogram-based Instant Messaging service and client to communicate with their relatives and acquaintances, thus serving as a tool to help reducing their social and digital exclusion situation.