establishing justice in healthcare services is currently a major challenge for public healthcare systems, especially in developing countries. inadequate distribution of resources and facilities is among the root causes of unfair access to healthcare. using ranking mechanisms, healthcare managers are able to compare different areas in terms of the services they receive, which will help achieve b...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), one of the prevalent branches of operations research, aims to design mathematical and computational tools for selecting the best alternative among several choices with respect to specific criteria. In the cloud, MCDA based online brokers uses customer specified criteria to rank different service providers. However, subjected to limited domain knowledge, ...

BACKGROUND The evidence on the extent to which stakeholders in different European countries agree with availability and importance of tobacco-control interventions is limited. This study assessed and compared stakeholders' views from five European countries and compared the perceived ranking of interventions with evidence-based ranking using cost-effectiveness data. METHODS An interview surve...

University rankings generally present users with the problem of placing the results given for an institution in context. Only a comparison with the performance of all other institutions makes it possible to say exactly where an institution stands. In order to interpret the results of the SCImago Institutions Ranking (based on Scopus data) and the Leiden Ranking (based on Web of Science data), i...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES While several experts have shared their visions of the Primary Care Extension Service (PCES) as called for in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), little is known about providers' perspective. We aimed to identify the most and least desired resources that primary care providers want from the PCES. METHODS A 70-question survey was administered to primary care providers (n=5...

BACKGROUND Over one third of reproductive age women in the US are obese. Pregnancy is a strong risk factor for obesity, with excess weight gain as the greatest predictor of long term obesity. The majority of pregnant women gain more weight than recommended by the Institute of Medicine guidelines. The objective of this study was to understand prenatal care providers' perspectives on weight gain ...

this paper attempts to rank the effective factors in making trust in social networks to provide the possibility of attracting and increasing users’ trust on these social networks for providers and designers of online social networks. identifying the effective factors in making trust in social networks is a multi-criteria decision making problem and most of effective factors are ambiguous and un...

The added-value of search engines is, apparently, undoubted. Their rapid evolution over the last decade has transformed them into the most important source of information and knowledge. From the end user side, search engine success implies correct results in fast and accurate manner, while also ranking of search results on a given query has to be directly correlated to the user anticipated resp...

We propose a cloud-based middleware model for autonomic operation of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) which will allow small and medium enterprises to join the MMOG market through near-zero initial infrastructure investment. In our model, resources are provisioned on-demand under automatically negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that establish the price, terms of operation, and...