Jing Du and Yong Han Department of Gastroenterology, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; Clinical Research Institute, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; People’s Hospital of Hangzhou Medical College, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; and Key Laboratory of Tumor Molecular Diagnosis and Individualized Medicine ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have concluded that there is significant variation in drug coverage across Canadian provinces because conventional measures of inter-rater reliability for formulary listings are low. We sought to investigate whether conventional methods are appropriate for formulary concordance measurement by testing the hypotheses that (a) conventionally measured variations in provi...

BACKGROUND The financial accessibility of antimicrobial drugs to the outpatient community in Canada is governed at the provincial level through formularies. Each province may choose to list particular drugs or impose restriction criteria on products in order to guide prescribing and/or curtail costs. Although changes to formularies have been shown to change patterns in the use of individual pro...

BACKGROUND Following initial regulatory approval of prescription drugs, many factors may influence insurers and health systems when they decide whether to add these drugs to their formularies. The role of political pressures on drug funding announcements has received relatively little attention, and elections represent an especially powerful form of political pressure. We examined the temporal ...

Since May 2009 the first National Health Accounts (NHA) for Pakistan have been finalised and published by Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) in cooperation with German Technical Cooperation (GTZ). This paper goes one step ahead of the report and analyses in more detail the regional differences in health expenditure structures in Pakistan. The further analyses can be divided into four parts: hea...