Health systems reform processes have increasingly recognized the essential contribution of communities to the success of health programs and development activities in general. Here we examine the experience from Kilifi district in Kenya of implementing annual health sector planning guidelines that included community participation in problem identification, priority setting, and planning. We des...

Preferred provider organizations (PPOs) represent a form of managed care in which providers agree to accept discounted fees in exchange for the expectation that their patient volume will increase or at least be maintained. Managed care plans that rely on discounted fee-for-service (FFS) payments have increased from about 10 plans in 1981 to over 700 plans in 1994. In this study, we document lev...

Background. Dengue outbreaks are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity. Evidence-based epidemic preparedness and effective response are now a matter of urgency. Therefore, we have analysed national and municipal dengue outbreak response plans. Methods. Thirteen country plans from Asia, Latin America and Australia, and one international plan were obtained from the World Health Organi...

Introduction The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) framework for implementation envisaged that District Health Action Plans would be the central hub for decentralised planning, inter-sectoral convergence, implementation and monitoring. These would feed into the annual State Programme Implementation Plans (PIP). Communitisation, including village planning, and locally suited innovations were ...

Despite the volume of the academic conservation biology literature, there is little evidence as to what effect this work is having on endangered species recovery efforts. Using data collected from a national review of 136 endangered and threatened species recovery plans, we evaluated whether recovery plans were changing in response to publication trends in four areas of the academic conservatio...

Integrated land-use and transport interaction models (LUTI) are praised for their ability to evaluate land-use and transport planning in an integrated and consistent modeling system. However, applications of empirically estimated land use models are rare. This paper will present the application of the Dutch national land-use/transport interaction model TIGRIS XL in a recent land-use and transpo...

ePlan is a collaborative program between the Australian land authorities and the surveying industry, in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) which aims to replace paper and PDF plans with digital files based on a national standard. ePlan was introduced in Victoria in 2011 and has been operational in this jurisdiction for 2D (non-building) plans since ...

As the General Counsel for the National Committee for Quality Assurance, which accredits health plans and measures outcome performance, Ms. Donohue is in a unique position to comment on the use of such data in litigation against health plans and providers. After reviewing the growing tide of class-action lawsuits in this area, she argues that such information should be protected under the commo...

Staff from the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the US describe recent improvements to the PubMed search engine and outline plans for the future, including a new experimental site called PubMed Labs.