BACKGROUND In 1995, teaching and public hospitals that are affiliated with the ministry of health and medical education (MOHME) in Iran were granted financial self-sufficiency to practice contract-based relations with insurance organizations. The so-called "hospital autonomy" policy involved giving authority to the insurance organizations to purchase health services. The policy aimed at improvi...

Introduction: Development of Complementary Health Insurance (CHI) benefit packages has always been one of the main challenges of Health Insurance Organizations in Iran. Records related to developing a health insurance package in Iran show that there is no specific criterion for developing such packages.  This study aimed at developing criteria for providing CHI benefit packages...

This purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of the cost-effectiveness research for the profession and practice of marriage and family therapy. Studies based on four sources of data were considered: (1) a western United States HMO covering 180,000 subscribers; (2) the Kansas State Medicaid system with over 300,000 beneficiaries; (3) Cigna, a large Unites States health insurance benefits m...

Burnout is a long-term stress reaction seen primarily in the human service professions. It is a “psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment” (1). Over the past 20 years, many aspects of medical practice have changed: autonomy is declining, the status of physicians has diminished, and work pressures are increasing. Burnout is an unintend...

OBJECTIVE To determine the sensitivity of employees' health insurance decisions--including the decision to not choose health maintenance organization or fee-for-service coverage--during periods of rapidly escalating healthcare costs. STUDY DESIGN A retrospective cohort study of employee plan choices at a single large firm with a "cafeteria-style" benefits plan wherein employees paid all the a...

Cyber insurance can be an effective instrument to transfer cyber risk and complement the benefits from technological controls that guard the IS (information and network) assets in organizations. This research attempts to identify the factors that could explain the proclivity of adoption of cyber insurance in managing cyber risk of an organization. Grounded on the context based TOE framework of ...

Being a citizen of a small country (Switzerland), my influence on policy was bound to be limited and mostly indirect. The biggest indirect influence probably has been through the textbooks Gesundheitsökonomie [1] in German-speaking countries and Health Economics [9] internationally. Otherwise, only six instances come to my mind where my work might have had a direct impact. The first was a popul...

Dr. Couch is a medical quality management consultant serving providers and purchasers of health care services (including insurers and corporations) nationwide. He represents the 6,000 physician executives of the American College of Physician Executives and American College of Utilization Review Physicians at the JCAHO. He is associated with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics of the...

The insurance and risk management industries are typically considered to have little interest in energy issues, other than those associated with large energy supply systems. The historical involvement of these industries in the development and deployment of familiar loss-prevention technologies such as automobile air bags, fire prevention/suppression systems, and anti-theft devices, evidences a...