background: today, nurses are exposed to everchanging complicated conditions in health care services, they provide. to be able to cope with these conditions effectively, they should be competent decision makers. besides, as decision making conditions get more complicated, using critical thinking is a need. the current study was carried out to evaluate the relationship between critical thinking ...

BACKGROUND Strategic focus on the clinical microsystems--the small, functional, frontline units that provide most health care to most people--is essential to designing the most efficient, population-based services. The starting place for designing or redesigning of clinical microsystems is to evaluate the four P's: the patient subpopulations that are served by the microsystem, the people who wo...

Honeybee swarms and complex brains show many parallels in how they make decisions. In both, separate populations of units (bees or neurons) integrate noisy evidence for alternatives, and, when one population exceeds a threshold, the alternative it represents is chosen. We show that a key feature of a brain--cross inhibition between the evidence-accumulating populations--also exists in a swarm a...

BACKGROUND This protocol builds on the development of a) a framework that identified the various supports (i.e. positions, activities, interventions) that a healthcare organisation or health system can implement for evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) and b) a qualitative study that showed the current mix of supports that some Canadian healthcare organisations have in place and the ones th...

Making a graph unit interval by a minimum number of vertex deletions is NP-hard. The problem is motivated by applications in seriation and measuring indifference between data items. We present a fixedparameter algorithm based on the iterative compression technique that finds in O((14k + 14)kn) time a set of k vertices whose deletion from an n-vertex graph makes it unit interval. Additionally, w...

In this work, an extended evaluation approach for decision making units (DMUs) with a single output is proposed. Firstly, the input and output data for each DMU are changed in the same proportion until all the outputs are equal, and then the coordinate system is established with input i as the ith coordinate axis. Secondly, in the coordinate system, the production possibility set, which is span...

As ICUs generate increasing amounts of information, writing medical reports involves complex time-consuming reasoning to build a coherent text which will be meaningful to those who will use it for decision making (e.g.: for nurse handover). Moreover, it has been shown that summarizing complex multi-channel physiological and discrete data in natural language (text) can lead to better decision-ma...

Examination of aggregate data on graduate admissions to the University of California, Berkeley, for fall 1973 shows a clear but misleading pattern of bias against female applicants. Examination of the disaggregated data reveals few decision-making units that show statistically significant departures from expected frequencies of female admissions, and about as many units appear to favor women as...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been a wildly used powerful method to measure efficiencies of decision making units (DMUs). However, DEA efficiency scores are influenced by uncontrollable factors for respective DMUs. Previous studies attempted separating such factors from DEA scores. Fried et al. [4] proposed a multi-stage data adjustment approach using DEA and a regression model, and sever...

Just as researchers and clinicians struggle to pin down the benefits attendant to health information technology (IT), management scholars have long labored to identify the performance effects arising from new technologies and from other organizational innovations, namely the reorganization of work and the devolution of decision-making authority. This paper applies lessons from that literature t...