— Agentcities is a network of FIPA compliant agent platforms that constitute a distributed environment to demonstrate the potential of autonomous agents. One of the aims of the project is the development of a network architecture to allow the integration of platforms based on different technologies and models. It provides basic white pages and yellow pages services to allow the dynamic discover...

A surge in hospital consolidation is fueling formation of ever larger multi-hospital systems throughout the United States. This article examines hospital prices in California over time with a focus on hospitals in the largest multi-hospital systems. Our data show that hospital prices in California grew substantially (+76% per hospital admission) across all hospitals and all services between 200...

e-services are just like normal services, but can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet completely. Increasingly, these e-services are offered as a multi-supplier bundle of elementary services. How to automatically compose these e-service bundles is considered as a key problem. Part of the composition process is to elicit the customer need for an e-service bundle, and to facilitate this e...

7 Indigenous and local knowledge system: a cumulative body of Indigenous peoples and local communities live in, manage and own vast areas often rich in biodiversity and critical for ecosystem services. Bridging indigenous and local knowledge systems with scientific knowledge systems is vital to enhance knowledge, practice, and ethics to move towards sustainability at multiple scales. We focus o...

the number of sexual transmission of hiv is increasing globally. sexual and reproductive health (srh) issues and hiv/aids related problems are rooted in common grounds such as poverty, gender inequality, and social exclusion. as a result, international health organizations have suggested the integration of srh services with hiv/aids services as a strategy to control hiv and to improve people’s ...

The implementation of the Medicare prospective payment system has sparked the growth of similar Medicaid systems. Eight State Medicaid agencies now employ a system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRG's), and another four State Medicaid agencies are planning to implement such systems in the near future. The eight DRG-based systems in existence in 1986 are examined in this article. Preliminary...

PCMH is being implemented in many settings, and the concept even appears in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 6 However, implementing the PCMH model can be a major challenge, and many primary care practices may not be ready to undertake such a significant change in care delivery. This study evaluates the readiness of primary care practices for implementing PCMH and provides guidel...

Uncertainty is a pervasive and important problem that has attracted increasing attention in health care, given the growing emphasis on evidence-based medicine, shared decision making, and patient-centered care. However, our understanding of this problem is limited, in part because of the absence of a unified, coherent concept of uncertainty. There are multiple meanings and varieties of uncertai...