Political realities and institutional structures are often ignored when gathering evidence to influence population health policies. If these policies are to be successful, social science literature on policy change should be integrated into the population health approach. In this contribution, drawing on the work of John W. Kingdon and related scholarship, we set out to examine how key componen...

Perspectives In the last 15 years there has been considerable growth in the amount of – and funding for – health policy and systems research. 1 However, research addressing health policy decision-making, across all stages of the policy process, has been relatively neglected. 2 Here we argue for an increased emphasis on policy in health systems research. We focus specifically on low-and middle-i...

BACKGROUND Despite the significant role "values" play in decision-making no definition or attributes regarding the concept have been provided in health policy-making. This study aimed to clarify the defining attributes of a concept of value and its irrelevant structures in health policy-making. We anticipate our findings will help reduce the semantic ambiguities associated with the use of "valu...

Background In 2004, the health system in Iran initiated an organizational reform aiming to increase the autonomy of teaching hospitals and make them more decentralized. The policy led to the formation of a board of trustees in each hospital and significant modifications in hospitals’ financing. Since the reform aimed to improve its predecessor policy (implementation of hospital autonomy began i...

Background National oral health policy was conscripted by the Indian Dental Association (IDA) in 1986 and was accepted as an integral part of National Health Policy (NHP) by the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare in one of its conferences in the year 1995. Objectives of this paper were to find out the efforts made or going on towards its execution, its current status and recent oral h...

a Professor and Director, Program in Economics and Health Policy, The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, Department of Health Policy b Assistant Research Professor, Department of Health Policy c Research Assistant, Department of Health Policy d Research Assistant, Department of Health Policy e Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Policy, Department ...

In 2017, the Affordable Care Act’s nongroup marketplaces saw premium increases averaging 21 percent, with substantially higher increases in some states.1 For the 2017 plan year, several insurers left the individual marketplaces (and, in some cases, individual markets as a whole), creating many more rating regions with only one or two insurers. These rating regions, as a result, have little insu...

Background Health apps are a booming, yet under-regulated market, with potential consumer harms in privacy and health safety. Regulation of the health app market tends to be siloed, with no single sector holding comprehensive oversight. We sought to explore this phenomenon by critically analysing how the problem of health app regulation is being presented and addressed in the policy arena...

Background In many parts of the world, ongoing deficiencies in health systems compromise the delivery of health interventions. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified four functions that health systems need to perform to achieve their goals: Efforts to strengthen health systems focus on the way these functions are carried out. While a number of studies on health systems functions have be...

there are fragmentations in iran’s health insurance system. multiple health insurance funds exist, without adequate provisions for transfer or redistribution of cross subsidy among them. multiple risk pools, including several private secondary insurance schemes, have resulted in a tiered health insurance system with inequitable benefit packages for different segments of the population. also fra...