Search for: All records

Despite providing convenience and reducing the travel burden of patients, Video-Conferencing (VC) clinical visits have not enjoyed wide uptake by patients and care providers. It is desired that the medical problems addressed by VC visits can match a face-to-face encounter in scope and quality. Subsequently, VC visits with nurse assistance are emerging; however, the scalable and financially sustainable of such services are unclear. Therefore, we explore the implementability of VC visits with nursing services using a game-theoretic model, and investigate the impact of different pricing schemes (discriminative pricing based on patient characteristics vs. non-discriminative) on patients’ care choices between VC and in-person visits. Our results shed light on the “artificial congestion” created by a profit-driven medical institution that hurts patient welfare, and subsequently identify the conditions where the interest of the social planner and the medical institution are aligned. Our results highlight that, compared to a uniform price of VC visits which seems fair, discriminative pricing can be more beneficial for patients and the medical institution alike. This heightens the importance of insurance coverage of telehealth-related services to promote the adoption of telehealth by patients and care providers, and ultimately, improving care access and patient outcomes. 

Abstract The superτ-charm facility (STCF) is an electron–positron collider proposed by the Chinese particle physics community. It is designed to operate in a center-of-mass energy range from 2 to 7 GeV with a peak luminosity of 0.5 × 10³⁵cm⁻²·s⁻¹or higher. The STCF will produce a data sample about a factor of 100 larger than that of the presentτ-charm factory — the BEPCII, providing a unique platform for exploring the asymmetry of matter-antimatter (charge-parity violation), in-depth studies of the internal structure of hadrons and the nature of non-perturbative strong interactions, as well as searching for exotic hadrons and physics beyond the Standard Model. The STCF project in China is under development with an extensive R&D program. This document presents the physics opportunities at the STCF, describes conceptual designs of the STCF detector system, and discusses future plans for detector R&D and physics case studies.