Dr. Raid W. Amin

Bronchiolitis is a common cause of readmission to the hospital for children under 2 years of age, with rates of 3.7% to 8.0% being readmitted within 30 days. It is estimated that among the annual readmissions for bronchiolitis 80% are potentially preventable.
There are only a few studies that address predictors for readmission.
Some of the factors related to readmission in the literature include respiratory syncytial virus/rhinovirus coinfection, age under 2 months, male sex, lower gestational age, chronic lung disease, living with school-age siblings, living <20 miles from hospital, low income, and being in the progressing stage of illness. None of these, however, are preventable factors.
The purpose of this study is to compare the influence of demographic, clinical, and environmental factors and interventions during initial hospitalization on rehospitalization within 30 days of discharge.

While rape is a very serious crime and public health problem, no spatial mapping has been attempted for rape on the national scale. This article addresses the three research questions: (1) Are reported rape cases randomly distributed across the United States, after being adjusted for population density and age, or are there geographical clusters of reported rape cases? (2) Are the geographical clusters of reported rapes still present after adjusting for differences in poverty levels? (3) Are there geographical clusters where the proportion of reported rape cases that lead to an arrest is exceptionally low or exceptionally high? We studied the geographical variation of reported rape events (2003-2012) and rape arrests (2000-2012) in the 48 contiguous states of the USA. The disease surveillance software SaTScan (TM) with its spatial scan statistic is used to evaluate the spatial variation in rapes. The spatial scan statistic has been widely used as a geographical surveillance tool for diseases, and we used it to identify geographical areas with clusters of reported rape and clusters of arrest rates for rape. The spatial scan statistic was used to identify geographical areas with exceptionally high rates of reported rape. The analyses were adjusted for age, and in secondary analyses, for both age and poverty level. We also identified geographical areas with either a low or a high proportion of reported rapes leading to an arrest. We have identified geographical areas with exceptionally high (low) rates of reported rape. The geographical problem areas identified are prime candidates for more intensive preventive counseling and criminal prosecution efforts by public health, social service, and law enforcement agencies. Geographical clusters of high rates of reported rape are prime areas in need of expanded implementation of preventive measures, such as changing attitudes in our society toward rape crimes, in addition to having the criminal justice system play an even larger role in preventing rape.

Amin et al. (1999) developed an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart, based on the smallest and largest observations in each sample. The resulting plot of the extremes suggests that the MaxMin EWMA may also be viewed as smoothed tolerance limits. Tolerance limits are limits that include a specific proportion of the population at a given confidence level. In the context of process control, they are used to make sure that production will not be outside specifications. Amin and Li (2000) provided the coverages of the MaxMin EWMA tolerance limits for independent data. In this article, it is shown how autocorrelation affects the confidence level of MaxMin tolerance limits, for a specified level of coverage of the population, and modified smoothed tolerance limits are suggested for autocorrelated processes.