background: in some primary health care settings, even where the health services are not available, provisions are not made to ensure continuity of care. this study aimed to determine the availability and level of continuity of care for maternal health services in the primary health centers (phcs) in nnewi, nigeria. methods: this was a cross‑sectional survey. using multistage sampling technique...

background hispanics comprise 17% of the total u.s. population, surpassing african-americans as the largest minority group. linguistically, almost 60 million people speak a language other than english. this language diversity can create barriers and additional burden and risk when seeking health services. patients with limited english proficiency (lep) for example, have been shown to experience...

--Adapting present Web services to the mobile environment has raised new Quality of Service (QoS) challenges for both service provider and requester. In a mobile Web services (MWS) scenario, a successful service invocation will depend on (1) service application (2) condition of mobile network and (3) capabilities of mobile device. Hence, from a client perspective, the availability of a service ...

Background Hispanics comprise 17% of the total U.S. population, surpassing African-Americans as the largest minority group. Linguistically, almost 60 million people speak a language other than English. This language diversity can create barriers and additional burden and risk when seeking health services. Patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) for example, have been shown to experience...

  Response time is one of the critical web service quality dimensions. It refers to how long it takes that a web service responds to request of a user. In order to manage the response time, pricing schemes can work as an efficient access control mechanism. In this paper, we study competition between two providers offering functionally same web services where there is a monopoly service provider...

This paper presents an overview of key factors a ecting performance of Web sites which may be using Web services protocols. We show how Web sites can be scaled with load balancers sending requests to multiple servers which can be distributed for both improved performance and availability. Caching, load balancing, and replication are critical components for achieving good performance and high av...

To some the next iteration of Grid and utility computing, Clouds offer capabilities for the high-availability of a wide range of systems. But it is argued that such systems will only attain acceptance by a larger audience of commercial end-users if binding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are provided. In this paper, we discuss how to measure and use quality of service (QoS) information to be ab...

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used to define obligations between network/service providers and customers in business relationships. The terms that define the guaranteed availability for a given period are fundamental to these contracts. The appropriate selection of the availability to be promised is still an open challenge for network operators due to: (i) SLAs are defined for finite peri...

Cloud availability is a major performance parameter for cloud platforms, but there are very few measurements on commercial platforms, and most of them rely on outage reports as appeared on specialized sites, providers’ dashboards, or the general press. A paper recently presented at the PAM 2014 conference by Hu et alii reports the results of a measurement campaign. In this note, the results of ...