BACKGROUND Surgical treatment of obesity is cost-effective and improves life expectancy. Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) and adjustable gastric banding (AGB) are dominant surgical techniques, but RYGB is the only publicly insured procedure in all Canadian provinces. Private clinics currently offer AGB with minimal wait times. We sought to compare RYGB in public facilities with AGB in private cl...

Background Inefficient diagnostic practices for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may contribute to longer wait times, delaying access to intervention. The objectives were to describe the diagnostic practices of Canadian pediatricians and to identify determinants of longer wait time for ASD diagnosis. Methods An online survey was conducted through the Canadian Paediatric Society's developmental ...

This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of LineKing (LK), a crowdsourced line wait-time monitoring service. LK consists of a smartphone component (that provides automatic, energy-efficient, and accurate wait-time detection), and a cloud backend (that uses the collected data to provide accurate wait-time estimation). LK is used on a daily basis by hundreds of users to moni...

BACKGROUND Protracted, multi-year wait times exist for bariatric care in Canada. Our objective was to examine wait-listed patients' health status and perceptions regarding the consequences of prolonged wait times using a cross-sectional study design nested within a prospective cohort. METHODS 150 consecutive consenting subjects wait-listed for multi-disciplinary bariatric assessment in a popu...

BACKGROUND Monitoring wait times and defining targets for care have been advocated to improve health care delivery related to cancer, heart, diagnostic imaging, joint replacements and sight restoration. There are few data on access to care for digestive diseases, although they pose a greater economic burden than cancer or heart disease in Canada. The present study compared wait times for specia...

The recent advent of multi-core computing environments increases the heterogeneity of grid resources and the complexity of managing them, making efficient load balancing challenging. In an environment where jobs are submitted regularly into a grid which is already executing several jobs, it becomes important to provide low job turn-around times and high throughput for the users. Typically, the ...

Extended wait times for elective procedures has been an important issue in the Canadian health care system for many years, and sight restoration was among the five priority clinical areas identified and targeted for wait time reduction by the Canadian first ministers in 2004. The extent to which this initiative has been successful for cataract surgery is unclear. According to a recent report fr...

BACKGROUND As no health system can afford to provide all possible services and treatments for the people it serves, each system must set priorities. Priority setting decision makers are increasingly involving the public in policy making. This study focuses on public engagement in a key priority setting context that plagues every health system around the world: wait list management. The purpose ...