Needles in a Haystack: Screening and Healthcare System Evidence for Homelessness.

Planning and Developing Services for Diabetic Retinopathy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Background Over the past few decades diabetes has emerged as an important non-communicable disease in SubSaharan Africa (SSA). Sight loss from Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) can be prevented with screening and early treatment. The objective of this paper is to outline the required actions and considerations in the planning and development of DR screening services.   Methods A multiple-case study app...

Does the Narrative About the Use of Evidence in Priority Setting Vary Across Health Programs Within the Health Sector: A Case Study of 6 Programs in a Low-Income National Healthcare System

Background There is a growing body of literature on evidence-informed priority setting. However, the literature on the use of evidence when setting healthcare priorities in low-income countries (LICs), tends to treat the healthcare system (HCS) as a single unit, despite the existence of multiple programs within the HCS, some of whic...

The Needles-in-Haystack Problem

We consider a new data mining problem of detecting the members of a rare class of data, the needles, that have been hidden in a set of records, the haystack. Besides the haystack, a single instance of a needle is given. It is assumed that members of the needle class are similar according to an unknown needle characterization. The goal is to find the needle records hidden in the haystack. This p...

Health Services Research Spending and Healthcare System Impact; Comment on “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal”

The challenges associated with translating health services and policy research (HSPR) evidence into practice are many and long-standing. Indeed, those challenges have themselves spawned new areas of research, including knowledge translation and implementation science. These sub-disciplines have increased our understanding of the critical success factors associated with the uptake of research ev...

Neurofascin antibodies in inflammatory neuropathy: how many needles make a haystack?