Objective: To assess US physicians’ attitudes towards using shared decision-making (SDM) to achieve cost containment. Design: Cross-sectional mailed survey. Setting: US medical practice. Participants: 3897 physicians were randomly selected from the AMA Physician Masterfile. Of these, 2556 completed the survey. Main outcome measures: Level of enthusiasm for “Promoting better conversations with patients as a means of lowering healthcare costs”; degree of agreement with “Decision support tools that show costs would be helpful in my practice”...

Motivation: 16S rDNA hypervariable tag sequencing has become the de facto method for accessing microbial diversity. Illumina paired-end sequencing, which produces two separate reads for each DNA fragment, has become the platform of choice for this application. However, when the two reads do not overlap, existing computational pipelines analyze data from read separately and underutilize the information contained in the paired-end reads. Results: We created a workflow known as Illinois Mayo Taxon Organization from RNA...