Vouchers can be a highly effective tool to increase access to and use of family planning and reproductive health services, especially for special populations including the poor, youth, and postpartum women. Voucher programs need to include social and behavior change communication with clients and quality assurance for providers, whether in the private or public sector. In the longer term, vouch...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Zephyr System provides a showcase for the ways in which emerging technologies can help streamline procurement processes and improve the coordination between participants in engineering projects by allowing collaboration in ways that have not been possible before. The project also shows the success of a highly pragmatic approach that was initiated by the...

Services spend is often considered a secondary target for cost reduction, yet studies suggest that services spend can account for 30 percent to 70 percent of an organization's total purchase dollars. Fearon and Bales (1995) state that " the opportunity to increase profits through more effective purchasing probably is greater in the buying of services than in the purchase of goods. " A logical s...

The supplier selection and order allocation are two key strategic decisions in purchasing problem. The review presented in this paper focuses on the supplier selection problems (SSP) and order allocation from year 2000 to 2017 in which a new structure and classification of the existing research streams and the different MCDM methods and mathematical models used for SSP will be presented. The re...

For companies operating under unfavourable macroeconomic conditions, such as high wage / high tax countries in central Europe, innovation has become a central theme to survive. If there is one thing that has changed in innovation management during the last decade, it is the growing reliance on external sources of technology. As a consequence, a new task for purchasing arises, as firms need an u...

Electronic patient data management systems (PDMS) were clinically used for the first time in the 1970s. Their purpose was to automatically document vital parameters sampled by monitors and to replace handwritten medical files. Because of the continuous development of computer technology, however, demands on PDMS have increased immensely. PDMS are currently expected to assist clinicians at every...

OBJECTIVE Despite the clear political will to promote telemedicine and the large number of initiatives, the incorporation of this modality in clinical practice remains limited. The objective of this study was to identify the barriers perceived by key professionals who actively participate in the design and implementation of telemedicine in a healthcare system model based on purchasing of health...