BACKGROUND There are calls for low and middle income countries to develop robust health financing policies to increase service coverage. However, existing evidence around financing options is complex and often difficult for policy makers to access. OBJECTIVE To summarize the evidence on the impact of financing health systems and develop an e-tool to help decision makers navigate the findings....

A long standing question related to immunization financing and sustainability has been whether the existence of a specific line item for vaccines purchasing within the national health budget can contribute significantly to increasing national government financing of vaccines and routine immunizations. Based on immunization financing indicators from 185 countries collected through the joint WHO ...

Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) financing is a unique form of financing that is allowed to firms filing under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code. The legal provisions confer enhanced seniority on this financing. It is argued that such financing leads to excessive investment in risky, (even negative NPV) projects. Defenders of DIP financing, on the other hand, argue that it allows funding for posit...

Uzbekistan inherited a hospital-based health system from the Soviet Union. We explore the health system-related challenges faced during the scale-up of ambulatory (outpatient) treatment for drug-susceptible and drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants of the TB services, the ministries of health and finance, ...

Egypt and Cuba are both lower-middle income countries with a history of socialist rule, which have embarked on economic liberalization since the 1990s. Cuba has achieved exemplary health status whereas health status in Egypt is lower than could be expected for its level of income. In this article, health care financing mechanisms in both countries are analysed on their effectiveness, efficiency...

The World Health Report 2000 (WHR 2000) is probably best remembered for trying to stack the health systems of different countries up against each other using a uniform set of measures (WHO 2000). Certainly, senior health officials in my own country (South Africa) repeatedly referred to our ranking of 175 out of 191 countries, in terms of overall health system performance, to highlight our pligh...

This paper describes a real-time decision-making model that combines the expressiveness and exibility of knowledge-based systems with the real-time advantages of anytime algorithms. Anytime algorithms ooer a simple means by which an intelligent system can trade oo computation time for quality of results. Previous attempts to develop knowledge-based anytime algorithms failed to produce consisten...

In a vision system, every task needs that the operators to apply should be « well chosen » and their parameters should be also « well adjusted ». The diversity of operators and the multitude of their parameters constitute a big challenge for users. As it is very difficult to make the « right » choice, lack of a specific rule, many disadvantages appear and affect the computation time and especia...

Today's systems for Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) suffer from several drawbacks: First, user interfaces are much too complicated for average users. Second, the quality of results tends to be low. Finally, querying performance with often long reply times is unsatisfactory. We have developed a model for CBIR searches intended to overcome these drawbacks where the user has to select only on...