BACKGROUND Psoriasis is associated with high treatment costs due to the increasing use of biologic drugs. Phototherapy has been demonstrated to be safe and cost effective for the treatment of psoriasis, although it is limited by the requirement for patients to visit a hospital various times a week. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the efficiency of home-based phototherapy with narrow-band UV-B radiatio...

1 Though the Internet has been a fast-adoption medium, even businesses such as banks that are particularly suited to moving online quickly have been finding that customer adoption of their e-services may be erratic. This paper is a first attempt to model the Scurve of Internet banking diffusion for a sample of 65 European major banks in the last 4 recent years (1997:2000). While a country Inter...

In Turkey, there is inadequate data about the direct or indirect cost of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). This study aims to identify the clinical, laboratory, and radiological properties, direct hospital costs of CAP, and the factors that affect these costs. Grouping of the subjects and cost analysis were evaluated in accordance with Pneumonia Severity Index (PSI) and 'Turkish Thoracic Soci...

This study examines the cost and profit efficiency of banking sectors in twelve transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) over the period 1993-2000, using the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) and the distribution free approach (DFA). The managerial inefficiencies in CEE banking markets were found to be significant, with average cost efficiency level for 12 countries of 72 and 7...

AIM In the Eplerenone in Mild Patients Hospitalization and Survival Study in Heart Failure (EMPHASIS-HF), aldosterone blockade with eplerenone decreased mortality and hospitalisation in patients with mild symptoms (New York Heart Association class II) and chronic systolic heart failure (HF). The present study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of eplerenone in the treatment of these patients in t...

Objective: Type 2 diabetes is amongst the most common chronic illnesses in Iran. Its prevalence is increasing and it has significant economic importance. The aim of this study was to estimate direct therapeutic and non-therapeutic costs of type 2 diabetes Patients Referred to the Diabetes Research Center of Yazd in 2012. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on 250 ...

The aim of this study was to assess costs and safety of immediate femoral sheath removal and closure with a suture-mediated closure device (Perclose, Menlo Park, CA) in patients undergoing elective (PCI). A total of 193 patients was prospectively randomized to immediate arterial sheath removal and access site closure with a suture-mediated closure device (SMC; n = 96) or sheath removal 4 hr aft...