Background The main purpose of this study was to identify factors that influence healthcare quality in the Iranian context.   Methods Exploratory in-depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 222 healthcare stakeholders including healthcare providers, managers, policy-makers, and payers to identify factors affecting the quality of healthcare services provided in Iranian hea...

Product development includes many different types of decision-making by engineers and managers. Design decisions determine the product form and specify the manufacturing processes to be used. Development decisions control the progress of product development projects by specifying which activities should happen, their sequence, and who should perform them. This paper introduces the concept of a ...

This paper proposes and characterizes a sequential decision aggregation system consisting of agents performing binary sequential hypothesis testing, and a fusion center which collects the individual decisions and reaches the global decision according to some threshold rule. Individual decision makers’ behaviors in the system are influenced by other decision makers, through a model for social pr...

the non-definite multi-attribute decision making problem is the further expansion of research to the traditional multi-attribute decision making problem. In the actual decision-making, because of policy-making question's complexity, decision-making information acquisition costs and other reasons, the decision information which the policy-maker can obtain are mostly ambiguous, so in the real lif...

When making recommendations about the public funding of new health technologies, policy makers typically pay close attention to quantitative evidence about the comparative effectiveness, cost effectiveness and budget impact of those technologies - what we might call "efficiency" criteria. Less attention is paid, however, to quantitative evidence about who gains and who loses from these public e...

with demand for health services continuing to grow as populations age and new technologies emerge to meet health needs, healthcare policy-makers are under constant pressure to set priorities, ie, to make choices about the health services that can and cannot be funded within available resources. in a recent paper, smith et al apply an influential policy studies framework – kingdon’s multiple str...

although public policy analysis is essential for public policy systems, the lack of public policy analysis is one of the most important problems of public policy making system in iran. thus, this research implemented to achieve a model for analyzing public policies, using multiple grounded theory method, to create theories and models compatible with the country`s conditions. for this purpose, p...

The decision-making process to introduce new vaccines into national immunization programmes is often complex, involving many stakeholders who provide technical information, mobilize finance, implement programmes and garner political support. Stakeholders may have different levels of interest, knowledge and motivations to introduce new vaccines. Lack of consensus on the priority, public health v...

BACKGROUND Decision aids have been developed in a number of health disciplines to support evidence-informed decision making, including patient decision aids and clinical practice guidelines. However, policy contexts differ from clinical contexts in terms of complexity and uncertainty, requiring different approaches for identifying, interpreting, and applying many different types of evidence to ...