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The concept of institutional performance can be regarded as embodying components on two dimensions: effectiveness, which is concerned with the congruence between outputs and goals or other criteria; and efficiency, which links outputs with inputs. The efficiency dimension, which has been relatively neglected in attempts to assess institutional performance, is defined, and its relationship to the economic concepts of efficiency and productivity is examined. The practical difficulties in assessment relate to the conceptualization and measurement of inputs and outputs in a manner reflecting an educational institution’s purposes and processes, and in a form which can be used as management information. This paper reviews the progress toward overcoming these difficulties and examines the ways that recent research addresses the analytical problems of assessing the input-output component of institutional performance. Studies of input-output relationships are classified into three categories: (1) input-output-ratio studies, which include the use of cost-analysis techniques and “productivity” ratios; (2) regression studies, which use statistical procedures to estimate the typical relationships among the variables; and (3) production frontier or data envelopment techniques, which identify and explore the most desirable input-output combinations or estimate the feasible range of these combinations.

A computerized medical decision-making system was used to monitor signs and predisposing factors of digoxin intoxication in patients receiving digoxin. This process automatically reviewed the patient's data base nightly for drug interactions, laboratory data and electrocardiographic findings with known association with digoxin intoxication. These decisions were formated into a "digoxin alert report" and sent to line printers in the nursing division to be placed on the individual patients' charts. To assess the effect of these reports on patient management, a randomized double-blind study was undertaken. Patients were assigned to an alert or nonalert group. Alert reports were withheld from charts of patients in the nonalert group. A medical record review was subsequently carried out, wherein the physician's orders were searched to identify actions taken with possible relation to the digoxin alerts. The computer monitored 396 patients over a 3 month period. Of these, 211 (53%) were randomized to the alert group and 185 (47%) to the nonalert group. Seventy-two percent of patients received at least one alert. The most frequently occurring alerts included: hypoxemia, hypokalemia, concurrent use of a beta-adrenergic blocking agent, renal insufficiency and ventricular arrhythmia. Results from the record review demonstrated a 22% increase in physician actions for the alert group. Specifically, patients in the alert group were 2.7 times more likely to have a serum digoxin determination ordered and 2.8 times more likely to have digoxin withheld on the day of a digoxin alert than were patients in the nonalert group.

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In the last decade, planning with domains modelled in the hybrid PDDL+ formalism has been gaining significant research interest. A number of approaches have been proposed that can handle PDDL+, and their exploitation fostered the use of planning in complex scenarios. In this paper we introduce a PDDL+ reformulation method that reduces the size of the grounded problem, by reducing the arity of sparse predicates, i.e. predicates with a very large number of possible groundings, out of which very few are actually exploited in the planning problems. We include an empirical evaluation which demonstrates that these methods can substantially improve performance of domain-independent planners on PDDL+ domains.