...organizations may have multiple assets running far below targeted capacity. ...decentralized equipment acquisition often doesn't take into account the service lines in which the organization wants ...to excel, or future safety and accreditation requirements.
Many physician group practices struggle over whether to buy or lease equipment. While purchasing has been the traditional method of acquiring equipment, leasing often can be more cost-effective. ...Conducting a lease-versus-purchase analysis can help group practices arrive at the most cost-effective decision. Careful consideration of the alternatives can lead to the best use of the group's resources to meet its financial goals.
The development and dissemination of weather and climate information is crucial to improve people’s resilience and adaptability to climate variability and change. The impacts of climate variability ...and change are generally stronger for disadvantaged population groups due to their limited adaptive and coping capacities. For instance, smallholder farmers living in remote areas such as the southern Peruvian Andes suffer strongly from adverse weather and climatic events such as droughts or frost. The project Climandes aimed at providing high-quality climate services in support of the agricultural sector in southern Peru by implementing the guidelines of the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS).
In Climandes, a two-fold challenge was tackled: the co-development of climate services by building up a continuous dialogue between the information provider (in this case the Peruvian national meteorological and hydrological service (NMHS)) and potential users; and the production of climate services through international cooperation. To this end, the NMHSs of Peru (SENAMHI) and Switzerland (MeteoSwiss) worked closely together to tackle issues ranging from the treatment of climate data to ensure the provision of reliable information to establishing continuous interaction with different user groups. In this paper, we postulate that this approach of close collaboration, the so-called twinning of the two NMHSs, was key for the projects’ success and contributed to strengthening the Peruvian NMHS institutionally and procedurally. This project overview guides its reader through the approach, main achievements, and conclusions regarding successes and challenges of the project, and reflects on some potential improvements for future initiatives.
Iron is essential for numerous cellular processes. For diagnostic purposes iron-related parameters in patients are assessed by clinical chemical blood analysis including the analysis of ferritin, ...transferrin and iron levels. Here, we retrospectively evaluated the use of these parameters in the phenotype-driven Munich N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea mouse mutagenesis project for the generation of novel animal models for human diseases. The clinical chemical blood analysis was carried out on more than 10,700 G1 and G3 offspring of chemically mutagenized inbred C3H mice to detect dominant and recessive mutations leading to deviations in the plasma levels of iron-related plasma parameters. We identified animals consistently exhibiting altered plasma ferritin or transferrin values. Transmission of the phenotypic deviations to the subsequent generations led to the successful establishment of three mutant lines with increased plasma ferritin levels. For two of these lines the causative mutations were identified in the
Fth1
gene and the
Ireb2
gene, respectively. Thus, novel mouse models for the functional analysis of iron homeostasis were established by a phenotype-driven screen for mutant mice.
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