McDonough’s perspective on healthcare reform in the US provides a clear, coherent analysis of the mix of access and delivery reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) aka Obamacare. As noted by McDonough, this major reform bill is designed to expand access for health coverage that includes both prevention and treatment benefits among uninsured Americans. Additionally, this legislation includes s...

Background Breast milk is the best and most effective food for infants and their survival and health. Promotion of breastfeeding self-efficacy is a goal of breastfeeding education. The purpose of this research was to teach breastfeeding through role-playing and explore its effects on breastfeeding self-efficacy among pregnant women referring to healthcare centers of Isfahan, Iran. Materials and...

The healthcare context is characterized with new developments, technologies, ideas and expectations that are continually reshaping the frontline of care delivery. Mannion and Exworthy identify two key factors driving this complexity, ‘standardization’ and ‘customization,’ and their apparent resulting paradox to be negotiated by healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers. However, whil...

In this thought paper, Professor Steven Spear argues that the way to achieve great operational performance and value has often been misunderstood. In order to ensure that good people and good science are facilitated, rather than overwhelmed, by systems, leaders have to expand their attention from ‘what individuals do’ to ‘how the pieces come together’. High quality care and great performance in...

The current healthcare delivery paradigm is defined by integrative care delivery across disparate providers and services. Therefore the ability to deliver efficient and effective healthcare services is dependent on designing and implementing interoperable systems. However, the notion of interoperability is multifaceted and complex. Although the exchange of data is often described as analogous w...

The economic approach of comparative and historical institutional analysis (Aoki 2001, Greif 2006) has virtually never been used in theoretical studies of healthcare incentives. This paper seeks to help fill this gap by exploring the explanatory power of such an approach for understanding incentives in China’s healthcare delivery system. It focuses on positive analysis of why China’s health sys...

conclusions with regard to the current challenges in iran’s health system, using risk-adjusted capitation as a primary healthcare payment system can lead to useful changes in the health system’s features. however, future research should focus on the development of the risk-adjusted capitation model. background when a country’s health system is faced with fundamental flaws that require the redes...

For more than three decades healthcare decentralization has been promoted in developing countries as a way of improving the financing and delivery of public healthcare. Decision autonomy under healthcare decentralization would determine the role and scope of responsibility of local authorities. Jalal Mohammed, Nicola North, and Toni Ashton analyze decision autonomy within decentralized services...

The operational management of healthcare services is expected to directly touch patient experiences. Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MoHME) for the first time, as such, has sought to improve the operational management of healthcare delivery within a reform agenda by setting benchmarks for ‘number of visit per hour’ and waiting time in outpatient clinics of about 700 affiliated...

Healthcare policy leaders internationally recognise that people's experiences of healthcare delivery are important, and invest significant resources to monitor and improve them. However, the value of particular aspects of experiences of healthcare delivery - relative to each other and to other healthcare outcomes - is unclear. This paper considers how economic techniques have been and might be ...