coverage of a topic, coupled with the development of powerful search engines (designed to help users find such Web sites), suggests that users can easily find comprehensive information about a topic. In domains such as consumer healthcare, finding comprehensive information about a topic is critical as it can improve a patient's judgment in making healthcare decisions, and can encourage higher c...

background: protecting households against financial risks is one of objectives of any health system. in this regard, iran's fourth five year developmental plan act in its 90th article, articulated decreasing household's exposure to catastrophic health expenditure to one percent. hence, this study aimed to measure percentage of iranian households exposed to catastrophic health expenditures and t...

Increasing accessibility and affordability of healthcare services has been considered as an important policy objective since the beginning of 1980s in Iran. However, current 60- 70% health care out-of-pocket payments create a barrier to an equal access to quality health services, especially in terms of new medicines which affects equity issues and "health" in Iran. Currently, health insurance o...

Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

This report synthesizes findings and lessons from case studies of four diverse health care organizations participating in the Brookings–Dartmouth ACO Pilot Program, launched in 2009 to support selected provider groups that are collaborating with private payers to form accountable care organizations (ACOs). The organizations are: HealthCare Partners, a medical group/independent practice associat...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To provide evidence-based research information about 27 herbs and natural products that have the potential to cause cancer and harm. DATA SOURCES Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database and Lawrence Review of Natural Products Monograph System. Information about these herbs has been found in evidence-based studies cited in the references. DATA SYNTHESIS Early research sho...

Health Level Seven (HL7) is an emerging standard in the healthcare industry. HL7 version 3.0 (v3) targets to achieve semantic interoperability among the healthcare systems through HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). In any healthcare system, information is ultimately stored in the database, which requires mapping of database to HL7 RIM. A key bottleneck in building HL7 systems is the laborio...