Despite the scientific and technological advances of recent decades and their potential impact on healthcare delivery, major disparities in child health exist both between and within countries. Across the globe, over 25,000 children under five years of age die every day, the majority, but by no means all, in developing countries. Infant mortality is 10 times higher in the world's least-develope...

In recent years, the shortage of medical specialists and access to medical information has necessitated a growing interest for cost effective and efficient telemedicine tools for healthcare delivery. Mobile telemedicine applications are aimed at meeting the mobility requirements of patients and doctors by integrating wireless communications for different health care services and education.Altho...

As competition intensifies within the health care industry, patient satisfaction and service quality are providing the evidentiary basis for patient outcomes. We propose a conceptual model of three interrelated areas, service, health outcomes, and resource stewardship, all affected by the clinician-patient relationship. Our model considers the perspectives of the health care organization, the c...

Public hospitals play an important role in the delivery of essential healthcare in Australia as in many countries. The Australian Government has in the recent years implemented national healthcare reform to improve the performance of and access to public hospital services. This reform extends to all public hospitals including remote hospitals. However, there is limited information on how reform...

Facility-based emergency care delivery in low-income and middle- income countries is expanding rapidly, particularly in Africa. Unfortunately, these efforts rarely include measurement of the quality or the impact of care provided, which is essential for improvement of care provision. Our aim was to determine context-appropriate quality indicators that will allow uniform and objective data colle...

In many ways SARS unmasked some painful truths about our existing system. Throughout the crisis we had to face head-on the unintended outcomes that flow from a healthcare delivery system designed as a series of unconnected silos.

OBJECTIVE Continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods are foundational approaches to improving healthcare delivery. Publications using the term CQI, however, are methodologically heterogeneous, and labels other than CQI are used to signify relevant approaches. Standards for identifying the use of CQI based on its key methodological features could enable more effective learning across quality i...

National health care reform and scrutiny on rising health care costs have created a climate in which health care providers must improve the value, or quality per cost, of patient care. Radiology in particular is at an important crossroads given the heavy use of imaging and the associated large percentage of health care expenditures. At this critical juncture, it is important for radiologists to...

Collaboration among health care providers and across systems is proposed as a strategy to improve health care delivery the world over. Over the past two decades, health care providers have been encouraged to work in partnership and build interdisciplinary teams. More recently, the notion of networks has entered this discourse but the lack of consensus and understanding about what is meant by ad...