BACKGROUND This study aimed at identifying components of the household health costs. METHODS 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 an...

The number of symptomatic hepatitis A cases has progressively been increasing during the last several years in Korea. Available cost estimates indicate a growing burden to the public. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of treatment costs for patients with hepatitis A and to analyze the influential factors with nationwide data. We collected data on 72,921 patients with hepa...

Urban water systems are impacted by land use within their source watersheds, as it affects raw water quality and thus the costs of water treatment. However, global estimates of the effect of land cover change on urban water-treatment costs have been hampered by a lack of global information on urban source watersheds. Here, we use a unique map of the urban source watersheds for 309 large cities ...

In this paper the problem of minimum cost communication network design is considered where the costs are piecewise linear concave. Several methods are compared: Simulated Annealing method, a heuristic based on the method proposed by Minoux, and a lagrangian method based on lower bounding procedure.

BACKGROUND Outpatient treatment of uncomplicated acute diverticulitis is safe and effective. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of outpatient treatment on the reduction of healthcare costs. PATIENTS AND METHODS A retrospective cohort study comparing 2 groups was performed. In the outpatient treatment group, patients diagnosed with uncomplicated acute diverticulitis were treated...

The health costs of alcohol-related problems in France were estimated using two cost evaluation approaches: (1) estimate based on the proportion of cases attributable to alcohol abuse (the alcohol abuse factor); (2) estimate based on prevalence of alcohol abuse for in- and out-patients. For a 10% prevalence of alcohol abuse in the general population, the minimum cost in 1996 was about US$ 2300 ...

This paper develops an integer mathematical programming model to design the cellular manufacturing systems under data envelopment analysis. Since workers have an important role in doing jobs on machines, assignment of workers to cells becomes a crucial factor for fully utilization of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). The aim of the proposed is to minimize backorder costs and intercellul...

Setup costs are a crucial factor in many branches of industry and frequently sequence dependent. However, the empirical acquisition of setup costs is inaccurate and not practicable for companies with large product portfolios operating in volatile markets. We therefore propose an abstract model for the estimation of such sequence dependent setup costs and subsequently apply dispatching and sched...

Transaction costs are a significant factor in outsourcing decisions. In the case of Internet security, outsourcing has higher transaction costs for two major reasons: (1) the outsourcing process is not yet standardized and (2) there is uncertainty about the frequency and impact of cyber attacks creating large variations in coordination costs. In this paper we study the effects of transaction co...