The Institute of Medicine's 2003 Unequal Treatment report raised the public's and policymakers' awareness of racial and ethnic health care disparities, but federal policy-makers have implemented few of the report's more than two dozen recommendations. State health care reform efforts, however, are gaining support around the country and have great potential to reduce health care inequality. This...

This article presents the approach and current findings of the EO2HEAVEN project, in particular from the Saxony Case Study. The aim of the Case Study is the conceptual design of a Spatial Information Infrastructure for better understanding the complex relationship between ambient air quality and its influence on the human health. This includes air quality modelling and a statistical analysis of...

INTRODUCTION The importance of building and strengthening effective infrastructures within the field of public health has increasingly been recognized. A wide variety of actors and structures can be identified for alcohol policy, including systems for policy development, monitoring, research and work-force development, but too little is known about the complex systems of infrastructure availabl...

Prompted in part by constrained national budgets, European governments are increasingly partnering with the private sector to underwrite the costs of constructing and operating public hospitals and other health care facilities and delivering services. Through such publicprivate partnerships, governments hope to avoid up-front capital expenditure and to harness private-sector efficiencies, while...

BACKGROUND India's economic growth rate in recent years has been fairly impressive. But, it has been consistently failing to make considerable progress in achieving health related Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. Lack of coherence between provisions and utilization becomes the face of the problem. Inadequacies in outreach, access and affordability coupled with escalating healthcare co...

BACKGROUND Underrepresentation of racial minorities in research contributes to health inequities. Important factors contributing to low levels of research participation include limited access to health care and research opportunities, lack of perceived relevance, power differences, participant burden, and absence of trust. We describe an enhanced model of community engagement in which we develo...

In the individual organization level, it is quite usual to distribute information technology into the basic infrastructure and to the applications resting on it. This kind of thinking is not so well developed in the national level, even though we there too clearly identify several kinds of infrastructures, such as those connected with traffic, waste management, education, power and energy suppl...

Though hospital information systems have been extensively studied as a technology and there is now a growing body of literature in the area of infrastructure interdependencies, the dependencies of civil and built infrastructure on the health care information infrastructure (HII) is understudied. In particular, there is no study to our knowledge that addresses the issue of Hospital Information I...

background nearly every nation in the world faces shortages of health workers in remote areas. cameroon is no exception to this. the ministry of public health (moph) is currently considering several rural retention strategies to motivate qualified health personnel to practice in remote rural areas.   methods to better calibrate these mechanisms and to develop evidence-based retention strategies...