objective: there are disparities in mental health services (mhs) utilization within and between populations and several factors are studied as its potential correlates. identifying those correlates would help health policy makers to adjust service provision with characteristics of their community. to evaluate demographic, socioeconomic and system correlates of mhs utilization among married wome...

background and objectives: induced demand in healthcare is referred to as provision of unnecessary services or the patient by health services providers, while the patient is not aware of their unnecessity. apart from being unethical, this practice can potentially disturb the supply and demand balance in the health market, pose financial load on the patient, thread the patient’s health by imposi...

conclusions geographic accessibility of pharmacies at night and on holidays has to be addressed by provincial health policymakers. materials and methods the analysis was based on straight-line distance measurements. we considered 150, 300, 450, 600, and 750 m for pedestrians, and 1, 2, and 3 km for driving accessibility as the acceptable distances. we calculated the number and percentage of hou...

Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) are presently standardized by IEC 61499 that proposes the use of Function Blocks (FBs) to control automation process. Reusability and flexibility of the control software are achieved as one of the main factors that initiated the appearance of this standard. Meanwhile, it is important to make a controller system easy to design since market demands change rapidl...

The use of wireless communications for real-time control applications poses several problems related to the comparatively low reliability of the communication channels. This paper is concerned with adaptive and predictive application-level strategies for ameliorating the effects of packet losses and burst errors in industrial sampled-data Distributed Control Systems (DCSs), which are implemente...

Life and language are discrete combinatorial systems (DCSs) in which the basic building blocks are finite sets of elementary units: nucleotides or codons in a DNA sequence and letters or words in a language. Different combinations of these finite units give rise to potentially infinite numbers of genes or sentences. This type of DCS can be represented as an Alphabetic Bipartite Network (α-BiN) ...

This paper is concerned with the analytical evaluation of two well known dynamic load balancing strategies, namely, shortest queue routing (SQR) and shortest expected delay routing (SEDR). We overcome the limitations of existing analysis methodologies, using a well known hybrid performance model that combines generalized stochastic Petri nets and product form queueing networks. Our methodology ...

Compressive Sensing (CS) can use fewer samples to recover a great number of original data, which have a sparse representation in a proper basis. For energy-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), CS provides an effective data gathering approach. Gaussian random matrix satisfies Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) with high probability. The class of matrices is usually selected as the measur...

background : despite an increased need, residents of rural communities have decreased access to healthcare and often present unique healthcare challenges associated with their rurality. ensuring medical students receive adequate exposure to these issues is complicated by the urban location of most medical schools. health fairs (fairs) conducted in rural communities can provide students exposure...

background : drug-drug interactions (ddis) are adverse reactions caused by a combination of drugs; they are often predictable and therefore avoidable or manageable. the objective of this study was to evaluate the nature, type and prevalence of potential ddis in prescriptions dispensed in university-based community pharmacies in tehran, iran. methods: from july 2012 to february 2014, sample of 1...