This article examines rationales for public intervention in health insurance markets from the perspective of public economics. It draws on the literature of organizational design to examine alternative public intervention strategies, including issues of contracting, purchaser provider splits, and regulation of competition. Health insurance reforms in four Latin American countries are then consi...

This report documents the clinical improvements and costs experienced by a purchaser after introduction of a diabetes disease management program. A purchaser contracted with American Healthways, a disease management organization, to initiate a diabetes disease management program called Diabetes Decisions. Started in 1998, the program grew to include 662 participants. The results reported are ba...

A survey of adolescents (N = 1,488) documented third-person perception (TPP) regarding Facebook use and cyber bullying. As Facebook establishes itself as the dominant social network, users expose themselves to a level of bullying not possible in the analog world. The study found that 84% of adolescents (middle school through college undergraduates) use Facebook, and that most users log on daily...

The challenge of combining these candidates to design an ideal medicine against malaria (Table 5) is formidable. There are still many unknown factors, not the least of which is that only a limited number of new classes of molecules have reached clinical evaluation. It is clear that a single molecule can have more than one attribute: a molecule can for example meet the criteria of more than one ...

Given two points p and q and a finite number of simple polygons in a plane. The basic version of a touring-a-sequence-of-polygons problem (in brief: a touring polygons problem, TPP) is how to find a shortest path such that it starts at p, then it visits these polygons in the given order, and finally it ends at q. This paper describes approximate algorithms for different versions of touring poly...

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No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser ...

---------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT---------------------------------------------------------------In this article e-payment scheme by mobile machine is considered. The requirements for a mobile machine in e-payment are presented, particularly when merchant employing accounts for payments and when using advertising. In the proposed scheme we will use the...

Major implications of outcomes management as they are relevant to managed care are discussed in this article. This article traces the movement from the perspective of health service researcher, the administrator or clinician executive, the clinician and the purchaser who must use such strategies as change agents in their organizations to improve quality and obtain value for the customers and pa...

BACKGROUND The Iranian health system, under the banner of family physician (FP) programme, has undergone substantial reforms to change utilization of health services, improve quality of care and enhance affordability. The national implementation of FP initiated in 2005 in parallel with rural health insurance (RHI) in rural areas and cities of <20 000 populations in Iran. The implementation of F...