BACKGROUND To provide an overview of the development of health technology assessment (HTA) in Iran since 2007, and to facilitate further development of HTA and its integration into policy making. METHODS Data of this study were collected through key documents (e.g. literature, laws, and other official documentation) and analyzed by experts of opinion in form of qualitative methods. RESULTS ...

Increasing integration services can improve opportunistic development by presenting monolith applications as opportunities for mashups. O pportunities are available resources that yield desired results. Their suitability depends on who seizes the opportunity and the context for its use. Opportunistic development relies on the availability of reusable software components to produce hybrid applic...

This work presents a novel approach for combining multiple Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) to a self-learning fall risk assessment tool. This tool is used by a new type of home-visiting nurses to track the fall risk of their patients. In order to provide personalized healthcare for elderly people, we combine multiple EPRs using an agent-based architecture, where each patient is represented by...

Reuse of software components can improve software quality and productivity significantly. This paper mainly concentrates on our approach to reuse assessment, which is a process of identifying and assessing the characteristics of a reusable component based on a set of well-defined reuse guidelines. This paper also proposes a scheme for measuring reuse potential. These techniques have been succes...

BACKGROUND Curriculum evaluation is key to continuous assurance of quality of education. OBJECTIVES To assess the teachers' perceptions on how well student teaching and learning activities were conducted at an institution that had practiced PBL for five years. METHODS A cross sectional descriptive study. 150 teachers from 23 departments at the College of Health Sciences participated in the ...

Because of its vulnerability to errors and, hence, unauthorised access, assignment of access rights is a critically important aspect of RBAC. Despite major advances in addressing this clearly using formal models, there is still a need for a more robust formulation, especially incorporating strict guidelines on assignment of access rights and how to perform such tasks as delegation of access rig...

In order to optimize the usage of testing efforts and to assess risks of softwarebased systems, risk-based testing uses risk (re-)assessments to steer all phases in a test process. Several risk-based testing approaches have been proposed in academia and/or applied in industry, so that the determination of principal concepts and methods in risk-based testing is needed to enable a comparison of t...

Humans have a long history of activity in Mediterranean Basin landscapes. Spatial heterogeneity in these landscapes hinders our understanding about the impacts of changes in human activity on ecological processes, such as wildfire. The use of spatially-explicit models that simulate processes at fine scales should aid the investigation of spatial patterns at the broader, landscape scale. Here, w...

This article presents an evolutionary framework for the establishment and progression of clientvendor relationships in the context of offshore applications development. It is argued that such a relationship typically begins as a cost-reduction exercise, with the client contracting out simple, structured applications to one or more offshore vendors. Over time, the client assigns increasingly com...

background and purpose: today, according to busy doctors, one of the ways to keep their medical information up to date is the use of evidence-based medicine (ebm). the purpose of this study was to determine the educational needs of ebm in clinical faculty members working in shahid beheshti university hospitals in tehran and the prioritization of these needs . methods: the study was descriptive,...