Decentralization has long been advocated as a desirable process for improving health systems. Nevertheless, we still lack a sufficient analytical framework for systematically studying how decentralization can achieve this objective. We do not have adequate means of analyzing the three key elements of decentralization: (1) the amount of choice that is transferred from central institutions to ins...

February 2014 witnessed the start of two remarkable public health events on Earth: The Ebola outbreak and the launch of Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA). Since the first case of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was confirmed, the total number of suspected and confirmed cases in the Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF) outbreak has increased to 13,268, including 8168 laboratory-confirmed cases and...

One of the key applications of operational research in health systems management is to improve the mechanism of resource allocation and program planning in order to increase the system efficiency. This study seeks to offer an innovative method for the planning and scheduling of health service units with the aim of reducing the patients' Length of Stay (LOS) in the Cardiac Surgery Ward of Razavi...

The challenge for public health officials is to detect an emerging foodborne disease outbreak from a large set of simple and isolated, domainspecific events. These events can be extracted from a large number of distinct information systems such as surveillance and laboratory reporting systems from health care providers, real-time complaint hotlines from consumers, and inspection reporting syste...

Twitter provides the freshest source of data about what is happening in the lives people across the world. The publicly available streams of status updates available on Twitter have been used to track earthquakes, forest fires and most especially flu outbreaks. Current techniques for tracking flu outbreaks rely on count data for a number of keywords. However, count data alone on the noisy Twitt...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and states are partnering to transform health care systems by creating and testing new models of care delivery and payment. Interviews with officials from states participating in the State Innovation Models (SIM) Initiative reveal that the readiness of providers and payers to adopt innovations var­ies, requiring different starting points, goals, an...

Automated disease surveillance systems are becoming widely used by the public health community. However, communication among non-collocated and widely dispersed users still needs improvement. A web-based software tool for enhancing user communications was completely integrated into an existing automated disease surveillance system and was tested during two simulated exercises and operational us...