A variety of program evaluation designs are available to assess the impact of disease or care management programs, which can make it difficult to compare outcomes of different interventions. The need to compare programs has resulted in consideration of standardizing evaluations of disease...

This article reviews the value of myoglobin, troponins, and creatine kinase, MB fraction (CK-MB) in diagnosis, risk stratification, and prognosis in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments (ED) with symptoms suggestive of acute coronary syndromes. Because the three markers differ...

Coronary heart disease (CHD) emerged in North America and Europe as a leading cause of disease and death in the mid 20th century, and is now rapidly increasing in developing nations. By the mid 1980s, American and European academic institutions had issued several sets of guidelines indicating...

Choosing between preference-based instruments of health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) in particular situations is an important area for research. Even where instruments can be assumed to be measuring the same thing, they may not be interchangeable. The study presented investigates the extent...

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a pathogen, commonly encountered in the recipients of solid organ transplantation and is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in these patients. CMV infection and disease have been shown to increase the cost of care in transplant recipients and several different...

Cost-effectiveness analysis has gained status over the last 15 years as an important tool for assisting resource allocation decisions in a budget-limited environment such as healthcare. Randomised (multicentre) multinational controlled trials are often the main vehicle for collecting primary...

The next century is likely to bring unforeseen genetic and biotechnological discoveries, with new benefits, risks and costs. This paper explores some of the problem areas that healthcare biotechnologies are likely to encounter. Biotechnological interventions may present particular difficulties...

Objective: There are multiple reasons for missing data in observational studies; excluding patients with missing data can lead to significant bias. In this study, we evaluated several methods for assigning missing values to health service utilisation. Design and setting: Cancer of the Prostate...