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Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners' written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies.Appealing to Justiceis both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely asymmetrical setting and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. Quoting extensively from their interviews with prisoners and officials, the authors give voice to those who are almost never heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms within the sociological literature-for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable and/or stigmatized populations to name injuries and file claims, and about the relentlessly adversarial subjectivities of prisoners and correctional officials-and they do so with striking poignancy. Ultimately,Appealing to Justicereveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

The aim of this paper is to understand and to model claims arrival and reporting delay in general insurance. We calibrate two real individual claims data sets to the statistical model of Jewell and Norberg. One data set considers property insurance and the other one casualty insurance. For our analysis we slightly relax the model assumptions of Jewell allowing for non-stationarity so that the model is able to cope with trends and with seasonal patterns. The performance of our individual claims data prediction is compared to the prediction based on aggregate data using the Poisson chain-ladder method.

Due to frequent traffic accidents around the world, people often take out car insurance to mitigate their losses and receive compensation in a traffic accident. However, in the existing car insurance claims process, there are problems such as insurance fraud, inability to effectively track and transmit insurance data, cumbersome insurance procedures, and high insurance data storage costs. Since the immutability and traceability features of blockchain technology can prevent data manipulation and trace past data, we have used the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to sign and encrypt car insurance data, ensuring both data integrity and security. We propose a blockchain and IPFS-based anticounterfeiting and traceable car insurance claims system to improve the above problems. We incorporate the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to reduce the cost of storing insurance data. This study also attempts to propose an arbitration mechanism in the event of a car insurance dispute.

Background An increased interest in medical liability claims has been noticed. Nevertheless, detailed data on subject of claims and possible factors that contribute to litigation and indemnity payments are scarce and relatively dated. Insight into these data may provide valuable information to prevent both incidents and malpractice claims. Objective To analyse the subject, outcome and costs of malpractice claims related to gynaecological care and their connection with treatment indications and treatment phases. Design A retrospective analysis of malpractice claims related to gynaecology. Setting All claims related to gynaecology, filed and closed by Netherlands’ largest liability insurance company, Centramed between 2005 and 2022. Sample N  = 382. Methods An in-depth analysis of claim files was performed. Results A total of 68.6% of the claims were related to perioperative incidents. A total of 88.0% of all claims were related to treatments with a benign indication and only 12.0% were related to malignancies. The share of malignant treatment indications was high for claims related to diagnostic incidents (37.9%), compared to 7.3% for claims related to surgical treatment. Liability was accepted in 22.5% of all claims. The total costs of all claims amount €6,6mlj. Besides the indication for treatment, deficient expectation management (a lack of informed consent) contributes to dissatisfaction and increases the risk of malpractice claims. Finally, an inadequate medical file compromises legal defence and influences the judgement and settlement of malpractice claims. Conclusions There is a connection between treatment indications and treatment phases and the risk of malpractice claims and their outcome.

The advancing technology and industrial revolution have taken the automotive industry by storm in recent times. The auto sector’s constantly growing demand has paved the way for the automobile sector to embrace new technologies and disruptive innovations. The multi-trillion dollar, complex auto insurance sector is still stuck in the regulations of the past. Most of the customers still contact the insurance company by phone to buy new policies and process existing insurance claims. The customers still face the risk of fraudulent online brokers, as policies are mostly signed and processed on papers which often require human supervision, with a risk of error. The insurance sector faces a threat of failure due to losing and misconception of policies and information. We present a decentralized IPFS and blockchain-based framework for the auto insurance sector that regulates the activities in terms of insurance claims for automobiles and automates payments. This article also discusses how blockchain technology’s features can be useful for the decentralized autonomous vehicle’s ecosystem.

Claims data are an important source of data for public health surveillance but have not been widely used in the United States because of concern with personally identifiable health information and other issues. We describe the development and availability of a new set of public use files created using de-identified health care claims for fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries, including individuals 65 years and older and individuals with disabilities younger than 65 years, and their application as tools for public health surveillance. We provide an overview of these files and their attributes; a review of beneficiary de-identification procedures and implications for analysis; a summary of advantages and limitations for use of the public use files for surveillance, alone and in combination with other data sources; and discussion and examples of their application for public health surveillance using examples that address chronic conditions monitoring, hospital readmissions, and prevalence and expenditures in diabetes care.

The data transmission in wireless networks is usually analyzed under the assumption of non-stationary rates. Nevertheless, they strictly depend on the time of day, that is, the intensity of arrival and daily workload profiles confirm this fact. In this article, we consider the process of downloading a file within a single network segment and unsteady speeds—for arrivals, file sizes, and losses due to impatience. To simulate the scenario, a queuing system with elastic traffic with non-stationary intensity is used. Formulas are given for the main characteristics of the model: the probability of blocking a new user, the average number of users in service, and the queue. A method for calculating the boundaries of convergence of the model is proposed, which is based on the logarithmic norm of linear operators. The boundaries of the rate of convergence of the main limiting characteristics of the queue length process were also established. For clarity of the influence of the parameters, a numerical analysis was carried out and presented.

In truth, the basic problem with global claims is one of evidence and it will always be so. Judges and Tribunals want to be convinced that 'on the balance of probabilities' the claimant's loss arose as a direct consequence of a respondent's act or omission. To meet this burden of proof is not so difficult if records have been maintained, analysed and compiled in a workmanlike way.

Abstract Objective To establish current practice in the use of Read codes for diabetes. Design Cross sectional study. Setting 17 practices in the Battersea primary care group in southwest London. Data sources Computerised medical records. Main outcome measures Number of codes in use in all practices; variation in the use of codes between practices; and prevalence of Read code use in diabetic patients. Results At least 9 separate Read code groupings and 25 individual diabetes codes were in use in the 17 general practices. Only one Read code (C10, diabetes mellitus) and its subcodes was being used in all 17 practices, but its use varied from 14% to 98% of patients with diabetes. The use of other key Read codes for monitoring the care of patients with diabetes also varied widely between practices; for example, < 20% of practices used the code for the location of care. Less than half of patients (45%) with diabetes had their type of diabetes coded, and even fewer (21%) had measures such as the examination of the retina coded. Conclusions The use of Read codes for diabetes needs to be standardised and coding levels improved if valid diabetic registers are to be constructed and the quality of care is to be monitored effectively. Until all patients with diabetes have the C10 Read code recorded, clinicians will have to use a wide range of Read codes and prescribing data to ensure that diabetes registers are complete.

This paper introduces a novel tool, public-key anonymous tag system , which is useful in building controlled privacy-protecting protocols. The double-trapdoor structure of the system not only allows the authority to create a token which can trace someone’s tags without violating anonymity of the tag issuer, but also allows the issuer to claim or deny the authorship of a tag in the stateless manner. An efficient instantiation based on simple assumptions in the standard model is presented. We then use it for a modular construction of traceable signatures. Our scheme supports a signature authorship claiming (and denial) that binds a claim to the public-key of the signer unlike that in known schemes. It is also the first scheme in the literature which features concurrent joining of users, stronger anonymity, and so on without random oracles.