BACKGROUND Medical tourism (MT) refers to circumstances in which people travel for medical treatments. The present study focuses on determining factors affecting MT in Iran. METHODS The study uses a mixed method approach. Initially, through a qualitative study, 12 experts were interviewed deeply; then, 22 participants in three equal focus groups expressed their ideas about growth and developm...

Many healthcare leaders find themselves overwhelmed with data, but lack the information they need to make informed decisions. Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) can help organizations turn their data into information. KDD is the process of finding complex patterns and relationships in data. The tools and techniques of KDD have achieved impressive results in other industries, and healthcare ...

this study aimed at identifying components of the household health costs.this study was a qualitative research conducted in two main phases. the first phase consisted of interviews with sample households selected in eight provinces of iran. they were to identify components of the household health costs. in the second phase, components were determined as direct, indirect and intangible based on ...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate associations among hospital volume, costs, and length of stay (LOS) and to assess whether reduced hospital cost of care adversely affected quality of care. DESIGN Four-year, nationwide, population-based study. SETTING Data were obtained from claims submitted to the South Korean National Health Insurance database. PATIENTS We identified 48 938 patients at 274 hospita...

BACKGROUND Healthcare technology and quality improvement programs have been identified as a means to influence healthcare costs and healthcare quality in Canada. This study seeks to identify whether the ability to implement healthcare technology by a hospital was related to usage of quality improvement programs within the hospital and whether the culture within a hospital plays a role in the ad...

Technology cannot be effectively used to drive improvements in health care quality and health care cost reduction until significantly more healthcare visits are attended. Visit attendance is often perceived as an intractable problem. This formative study identified and analyzed a set of visit adherence determinants to delineate a structure of adherence. The study is distinguished from previous ...