In the current volatile and demanding business environment, managers are so eager to demonstrate that their organizations are excellent which can mainly be achieved through continuous performance improvement. The most applicable and suitable tools that by the assessment of organizations shows how successful they are in the organizational excellence path is European Foundation for Quality Manage...

Biological processes are full of variations and so are responses to therapy as measured in clinical research. Estimators of clinical efficacy are, therefore, usually reported with a measure of uncertainty, otherwise called dispersion. This study aimed to review both the flaws of data reports without measure of dispersion and those with over-dispersion.EXAMPLES OF ESTIMATORS COMMONLY REPORTED WI...

The paper of Finan and Hurley – published in Computers and Operations Research (2002) – was re-examined, where they discussed a seemingly contradictory phenomenon resulting from the ignoring of wash criteria in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). With that, they raised a serious challenge to the AHP methodology. However, by reviewing their arguments and example data, analyses regarding to the...

On-line analytical processing (OLAP) is an example of a new breed of tools for decision support that give decision makers the flexibility to customize the selection, aggregation, and presentation of data. To understand the impact of this type of tool, we study an implementation of an OLAP interface on the CATCH data warehouse used by knowledge workers at a regional health planning agency in the...

The first publication on the subject of this special issue appeared in 1926 [1]. This report described the analysis of halides in ∼1 mL of sap taken from Nitella plant cells. While useful for giant plant cells, the technologies available at that time were not adequate for investigating non-plant cells, including mammalian cells. It was not until 1952, when immortal cell lines became available, ...

It is highly desirable to base decisions designed to improve medical practice or organ allocation policies on the analyses of the most recent data available. Yet there is often a need to balance this desire with the added value of evaluating long-term outcomes (e.g. 5-year mortality rates), which requires the use of data from earlier years. This article explains the methods used by the Scientif...