The journal Cost-Effectiveness and Resource Allocation (CERA) is now in its seventh year, and is an excellent example of how open access publishing can improve dissemination. Now the journal is through its infancy, it is time to reflect on its orientation and to define the strategy for the years to come. Firstly, the journal will pay particular attention to stimulating and publishing studies or...

BACKGROUND Low back pain (LBP) and fibromyalgia (FM), also known as chronic widespread pain (CWP), are highly prevalent chronic painful conditions that have substantial impact on patients, health care systems, and society. Diagnosis is complex and management strategies are associated with various levels of evidence for effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Multidisciplinary pain services have b...

BACKGROUND Heart failure disease management programs can influence medical resource use and quality-adjusted survival. Because projecting long-term costs and survival is challenging, a consistent and valid approach to extrapolating short-term outcomes would be valuable. METHODS We developed the Tools for Economic Analysis of Patient Management Interventions in Heart Failure Cost-Effectiveness...

Internet data centers host multiple Web applications on shared hardware resources. These data centers are typically provisioned to meet the expected peak demands of the hosted applications based on normal time-of-day effects. Such an over-provisioning approach is not robust to flash crowd scenarios, where the load increase of some hosted applications is much higher than their expected peak load...

Social tagging is the process of assigning and sharing among users freely selected terms of resources. This approach enables users to annotate/describe resources, and also allows users to locate new resources through the collective intelligence of other users. Social tagging offers a new avenue for resource discovery as compared to taxonomies and subject directories created by experts. This cha...

It is difficult to perform resource allocation for a node with the agreed QoS requirement in a ubiquitous network, which consists of subnetwork segments of different technologies with different resource constraints and control. In this paper, we discuss performance analysis of a priority based resource allocation scheme for the Unodes, i.e., nodes running a ubiquitous application in a ubiquitou...

The cultural diversity of U.S. organizations is increasing rapidly. In spite of this, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact that the increase in diversity may have on (a) the acceptance of human resource management processes and practices (e.g., recruitment, selection, training, performance appraisal, and compensation and benefits) by individuals and (b) the effectiveness of s...

The need for quantifying the effect of resource pooling on performance of multi-processing systems arises frequently in the design of a variety of manufacturing, communication, and service systems. In this paper, we examine the effect of resource pooling and assess its impact on system performance. In particular, we provide performance bounds on the effectiveness of several pooling scenarios an...

This study presents the Priority based ranking of jobs and resources to improve the Makespan in the grid scheduling problem. Grid environment’s effectiveness largely depends on scheduler’s effectiveness/efficiency as they act as local resource brokers. The scheduler is responsible to select resources/scheduling jobs so that users/application requirements are met regarding overall execution time...