BACKGROUND Panama is, economically, the fastest growing country in Central America and is making efforts to improve management mechanisms for research and innovation. However, due to contextual factors, the Panamanian Health Research System is not well developed and is poorly coordinated with the Health System. Likewise, despite recent efforts to define a National Health Research Agenda, implem...

The Disability Adjusted Life-Year (DALY) heralded a new age in the development of an evidence base for priority setting and resource allocation. The DALY was intended to represent sound measurement of the incidence and prevalence of conditions in a process by which burden of disease would be determined, health conditions prioritised and interventions evaluated. However, in the reification of ob...

BACKGROUND: Health organizations the world over are required to set priorities and allocate resources within the constraint of limited funding. However, decision makers may not be well equipped to make explicit rationing decisions and as such often rely on historical or political resource allocation processes. One economic approach to priority setting which has gained momentum in practice over ...

Background In order to meet the challenges presented by increasing demand and scarcity of resources, healthcare organizations are faced with difficult decisions related to resource allocation. Tools to facilitate evaluation and improvement of these processes could enable greater transparency and more optimal distribution of resources.   Methods The Resource Allocation Performance Assessment Too...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Priority setting in health research is a dynamic process. Different organizations and institutes have been working in the field of research priority setting for many years. In 1999 the Global Forum for Health Research presented a research priority setting tool called the Combined Approach Matrix or CAM. Since its development, the CAM has been successfully applied to set r...

Background In this article, we analyze one case instance of how proposals for change to the priority setting and resource allocation (PSRA) processes at a Canadian healthcare institution reached the decision agenda of the organization’s senior leadership. We adopt key concepts from an established policy studies framework – Kingdon’s multiple streams theory – to inform our analysis.   Methods Tw...

This paper describes evidence-based priority setting and resource allocation undertaken by a Division of the Women's & Children's Hospital, Adelaide during 1998-1999. We describe the methods used to combine program budgeting marginal analysis (PBMA), evidence based and "community values" approaches into one decision-making framework. Previous organisational changes involving the formation of mu...