This study conducted an experiment in Mali to test whether patients pressure doctors to prescribe medical treatment they do not necessarily need. The experiment varied patients' information about a discount for antimalarial tablets and measured demand for both tablets and costlier antimalarial...

Objectives Interpretation of the research literature can be difficult, yet it is essential in order for physiotherapists to convey the details of risks and benefits associated with therapeutic interventions to patients. The number needed to treat (NNT) statistic is one such statistic that is...

Telemedicine systems are inherently distributed, but, especially in the context of the Internet-of-Things, their complete physical configuration may only be determined after design time by considering, for example, the individual patient's needs. Therefore, to enable pervasive and...

A key test of a political system is its capacity to solve important societal problems. Few policy areas in the U.S. are more problem-ridden than health care. Medical care is expensive and wasteful, and the quality often falls short of best practice. One idea to improve health care is to...

Abstract I’d like to highlight some of the points about research on mammography screening that Dr. Miettinen and I agree on. But I disagree with the main point he tries to make.

Proponents of Evidence-based medicine (EBM) do not provide a clear role for basic science in therapeutic decision making. Of what they do say about basic science, most of it is negative. Basic science resides on the lower tiers of EBM's hierarchy of evidence. Therapeutic decisions, according to...

PURPOSE: This is the second of a 3-part series presenting 2 effective applications-acuity and dosage-that describe how the business case for case management (CM) can be made. In Part I, dosage and acuity concepts were explained as client need-severity, CM intervention-intensity, and CM...

BACKGROUND: The Health and Health Services Research Fund (HHSRF) is dedicated to support research related to all aspects of health and health services in Hong Kong. We evaluated the fund's outcomes and explored factors associated with the translation of research findings to changes in health...

Mortality statistics systems provide basic information on the levels and causes of mortality in populations. Only a third of the world's countries have complete civil registration systems that yield adequate cause-specific mortality data for health policy-making and monitoring. This paper...