for more than three decades healthcare decentralization has been promoted in developing countries as a way of improving the financing and delivery of public healthcare. decision autonomy under healthcare decentralization would determine the role and scope of responsibility of local authorities. jalal mohammed, nicola north, and toni ashton analyze decision autonomy within decentralized services...

As recently acknowledged by the Institute of Medicine, the existing pandemic mitigation models lack dynamic decision support capabilities. This paper develops a simulation optimization model for generating dynamic resource distribution strategies over a network of regions exposed to a pandemic. While the underlying simulation mimics the disease and population dynamics of the affected regions, t...

Flat-Panel Computed Tomography (CT) has found its commonly used applications in the healthcare field by providing an approach of examining 3D structural information of a human’s body. The popular CT reconstruction algorithms are based on a filtered backprojection (FBP) scheme, which would face challenges when imaging the knee. This is because in some views, the X-rays are highly attenuated when...

Protein therapeutics, such as antibodies and antibody fragments, are becoming increasingly important. While these proteins offer unparalleled benefits in terms of targeting and specificity, issues such as the risk of immunogenic reactions in patients and the potentially high cost of the end product goods also present potential problems for pharmaceutical companies. To minimize these and other c...

Within process mining, discovery techniques make it possible to construct business models automatically from event logs. However, results often do not achieve a balance between model complexity and fitting accuracy, establishing need for manual adjusting. This paper presents an approach mining that provides semi-automatic support optimization based on the combined assessment of fitness. To fitn...

© 2011 Mari Carmen Domingo 299 Energy consumption is a key issue in body sensor networks (BSNs) since energy-constrained sensors monitor the vital signs of human beings in healthcare applications. In this paper, packet size optimization for BSNs has been analyzed to improve the efficiency of energy consumption. Existing studies on packet size optimization in wireless sensor networks cannot be a...

Autonomous wireless devices for healthcare monitoring become a reality only if such devices are embedded with enough intelligent and processing capabilities to minimize the amount of data being transferred through the wireless network. Also, the embedded processing capability must be made energy efficient so that the device can operate on scavenged energy or very limited battery power. This pap...

Perioperative care is complex and involves multiple interconnected subsystems. Delayed starts, prolonged cases and overtime are common. Surgical procedures account for 40-70% of hospital revenues and 30-40% of total costs. Most planning and scheduling in healthcare is done without modern planning tools, which have potential for improving access by assisting in operations planning support. We id...

Most members of the Jehovah's Witness community refuse blood transfusions, and there are variations in what alternatives they will accept depending on their personal decisions. To provide culturally competent care, healthcare providers need to be knowledgeable about substitutions for blood administration as well as the risks and benefits of available alternatives so that they can inform their p...