Objectives. To examine the utilisation pattern of accident and emergency services and to study the possible impact of a user-fee policy on non-emergency attendances in Hong Kong. Design. Retrospective study. Methods. Four different scenarios are postulated to examine the impact on the number of accident and emergency attendances of a user-fee policy from 2000 to 2029. Patient volume data of acc...

In many African countries, user fees have failed to achieve intended access and quality of care improvements. Subsequent user fee reduction or elimination policies have often been poorly planned, without alternative sources of income for facilities. We describe early implementation of an innovative national health financing intervention in Kenya; the health sector services fund (HSSF). In HSSF,...

We propose PET (Personal Elegant assistanT) agent model, an agent model suitable for information kiosk systems supporting mobile users, which provides cyberspace services in user-adaptive manner. PET agent model consists of four types of agents; Interface Agent (IA) which supports user interactions on the terminals, User Agent (UA) which manages user's profiles, Service Agent (SA) which general...

Co-opting physicians to regulate Fee-for-Service (FFS) payment is more feasible and simpler to administer than capitation, Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) and pay-for-performance. The key lies in designing and revising the fee schedule, which not only defines and sets the fee for each item, but also the conditions of billing. Adherence to these regulations must be strictly audited in order to c...

In the past decade, state government appropriation reductions have forced park agencies to seek other sources of revenue support operations. To overcome shrinking budgets, many public embrace private-sector business models and investigate customer satisfaction, service quality, user fee structures. The purpose this study was obtain input regarding general experience use history visitation. A to...

Background A number of developing countries have contracted out public health facilities to the Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in order to improve service utilization. However, there is a paucity of in-depth qualitative information on barriers to access services as a result of contracting from service users’ perspective. The objective of this study was to explore perceived barriers to util...