Background: Recently, enormous efforts to measure the quality of health care have been made (i.e. AHRQ, OECD) in order to get information about ways to improve the quality of health care. However this area of research is still in an early stage of development and more research has to be done....

Methods: A decision tree model was built with life years gained as outcome, from the perspective of the health system, and including all direct costs. Pharmaceutical prices were obtained from the System of Information of Medicaments SISMED (2008), and the value of procedures was calculated from...

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are designed to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare through enhanced information sharing between disparate health entities. The objective of this study is to systematically examine the impact of HIE use in emergency departments (EDs) on quality...

In the late 1990s, the FDA opened the floodgates for pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products directly to patient-consumers. Due to this direct-to-consumer advertising and the advent of the Internet, which together provide ready access to large quantities of generic and sometimes...

Securing access to effective antimicrobials is one of the greatest challenges today. Until now, efforts to address this issue have been isolated and uncoordinated, with little focus on sustainable and international solutions. Global collective action is necessary to improve access to life-saving...

Greek health outcomes compare favourably with the OECD average. However, the health care system is seen as not working well by the population. One source of dissatisfaction is the high proportion of private household spending on health, including informal payments, while public health spending...

Despite the country’s policies and programs towards universal health care, health is not improving as well as expected, which suggests that households still face significant barriers to their choice of and access to health care, and their timing of use of health services. Using a nationally...

Very little is known about the productive efficiency of the large scale contracting-out mechanism that delivers basic healthcare services in Afghanistan. This study analyses the relative efficiency of basic package of health services (BPHS) facilities and examines the factors associated with the...

This analysis has two purposes. The first is to establish that physicians owe their patients a fiduciary duty. Courts and commentators have widely acknowledged that this duty exists because of the nature of the special relationship between a physician and a patient. Application of this duty has...

Medical care organizations (MCOs), such as health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations, have become popular in recent decades because of their ability to lower consumers' healthcare costs while increasing providers' throughput. These organizations function as healthcare...