Digital health interventions have enormous potential as scalable tools to improve health and healthcare delivery by improving effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility, safety, and personalization. Achieving these improvements requires a cumulative knowledge base to inform development and deployment of digital health interventions. However, evaluations of digital health interventions present spe...

Health financing policies are marked by confusion between policy tools and policy objectives, especially in low and middle income countries. This paper attempts to address this problem by providing a conceptual framework that is driven by the normative objective of enhancing the 'insurance function' (access to needed care without financial impoverishment) of health care systems. The framework i...

BACKGROUND Performance measures are often neglected during the transition period of national health insurance scheme implementation in many low and middle income countries. These measurements evaluate the extent to which various aspects of the schemes meet their key objectives. This study assesses the implementation of a health insurance scheme using optimal resource use domains and examines po...

Background: Recently, exploring novel dietary nondigestible carbohydrates, which are able to influence the gut flora, has drawn much attention. The objective of this study was to find out the effective dose of levan, as a prebiotic, in rats in order to further apply it in the food industry. Methods: Levan at various doses (2-10%) was orally administered to male Wistar Albino rats once a day for...

Long-term care (LTC) must be carefully delineated when expenditures are compared across countries because how LTC services are defined and delivered differ in each country. LTC’s objectives are to compensate for functional decline and mitigate the care burden of the family. Governments have tended to focus on the poor but Germany opted to make LTC universally available ...

The creators of the Medicare Advantage (MA) program envisioned that seniors would opt out of fee-for-service Medicare to take advantage of the lower premiums, lower cost-sharing, and additional benefits available in private plans. Earlier research, however, indicates that out-of-pocket costs for MA enrollees vary widely by health status and plan benefit package. This issue brief examines out-of...

OBJECTIVE To measure the impact of a maternal health package on health facility delivery and stillbirth rates. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study in Ethiopia where a maternal package was integrated into eight health centers across three regions. The package included trained midwives with a mentoring program, transport for referral, and equipment and accommodation for the midwives. Ten he...

BACKGROUND Poverty due to illness has become a substantial social problem in rural China since the collapse of the rural Cooperative Medical System in the early 1980s. Although the Chinese government introduced the New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes (NRCMS) in 2003, the associations between different health insurance benefit package designs and healthcare utilization remain largely unknown. ...

Changing regulatory approaches to fortification in Canada have enabled the expansion of the novel beverage market, but the nutritional implications of these new products are poorly understood. This study assessed the micronutrient composition of energy drinks, vitamin waters, and novel juices sold in Canadian supermarkets, and critically examined their on-package marketing at 2 time points: 201...