MAP-IT: A Practical Tool for Planning Complex Behavior Modification Interventions

MAP-IT: A Practical Tool for Planning Complex Behavior Modification Interventions

Health research often aims to prevent noncommunicable diseases and to improve individual and public health by discovering intervention strategies that are effective in changing behavior and/or environments that are detrimental to one's health. Ideally, findings from original research support practitioners in planning and implementing effective interventions. Unfortunately, interventions often f...

Developing a household survey tool for health equity: A practical guide in Islamic Republic of Iran

Background: An obvious gradient in health outcomes has been implicated in many evidences relating to social and economic factors. Proper data are requested to convince policy-makers calling for intersectoral action for health. Recently, I.R. of Iran has come up with 52 health equity indicators to monitor health equity through the country. Conducting regular surveys on 14 out of 52 national heal...

Quantitative Dengue Test: Is it Practical for Clinical Practice?

“Budget Impact Analyses”: a practical policy making tool for drug reimbursement decisions

Increasing accessibility and affordability of healthcare services has been considered as an important policy objective since the beginning of 1980s in Iran. However, current 60- 70% health care out-of-pocket payments create a barrier to an equal access to quality health services, especially in terms of new medicines which affects equity issues and "health" in Iran. Currently, health insurance o...

Utility Fusion: Map-Based Planning in a Behavior-Based System

* New address as of November 3, 1997: Dept. of Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia A new means of distributed action selection via utility fusion is introduced here as an alternative to both the bottlenecks of centralized systems and the incoherent action selection of distributed systems. Within the utility fusion framework, distributed, independent, a...