Biomedical health services and health systems research require timely, complete, accurate and accessible data relating to geographical populations in order to facilitate needs assessment and planning of medical care, new medicines and technology. The international trend towards competition and privatisation has largely proceeded as if data generation were immune to market fragmentation and loss...

This study has developed and evaluated a multiobjective metaheuristic for redistricting to draw territory lines for geographical zones for the purpose of space control. The proposed multiobjective metaheuristic is briefly explained to shows its components and functionality. The redistricting problem definition is discussed, followed by the metaheuristic and the multiobjective decision rules. Th...

In the frequency allocation problem, we are given a cellular telephone network whose geographical coverage area is divided into cells, where phone calls are serviced by assigned frequencies, so that none of the pairs of calls emanating from the same or neighboring cells is assigned the same frequency. The problem is to use the frequencies efficiently, i.e. minimize the span of frequencies used....

This paper aims to propose a research agenda that explores the problems that emerge when S&T indicators are used in peripheral contexts, that is, in geographical or social spaces that are somehow marginal to the centres of scientific activity. In these situations evaluators and decision-makers are likely to use indicators that were designed to reflect variables relevant in the dominant social a...

The Health Resources Allocation Model (HRAM) is an eLearning tool for health cadres and scientists introducing basic concepts of sub-national, rational district-based health planning and systems thinking under resources constraint. HRAM allows the evaluation of resource allocation strategies in relation to key outcome measures such as coverage, equity of services achieved and number of deaths a...

In this article we solve the radio network design problem (RND). This NP-hard combinatorial problem consist of determining a set of locations for placing radio antennae in a geographical area in order to offer high radio coverage using the smallest number of antennae. This problem is originally found in mobile telecommunications (such as mobile telephony), and is also relevant in the rising are...

The Health Resources Allocation Model (HRAM) is an eLearning tool for health cadres and scientists introducing basic concepts of sub-national, rational district-based health planning and systems thinking under resources constraint. HRAM allows the evaluation of resource allocation strategies in relation to key outcome measures such as coverage, equity of services achieved and number of deaths a...

BACKGROUND We here describe the construction of the Stockholm CREAtinine Measurement (SCREAM) cohort and assess its coverage/representativeness of the Stockholm county in Sweden. SCREAM has the principal aims to estimate the burden and consequences of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and to identify inappropriate drug use (prescription of nephrotoxic, contraindicated or ill-dosed drugs). METHODS ...

Brute health information delivery to various devices can be easily achieved these days, making health information instantly available whenever it is needed and nearly anywhere. However, brute health information delivery risks overloading users with unnecessary information that does not answer their actual needs, and might even act as noise, masking any other useful and relevant information deli...

Introduction Qualitative spatial reasoning is a valid support for inferring relationships in geographical spaces. In particular, qualitative inferences are cognitively more expressive than quantitative ones, and support reasoning mechanisms in the absence of complete spatial knowledge (Cohn 1997). In geographical space, reasoning on spatial entities is supported by representations that mainly i...