INTRODUCTION This article is part of a Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on Health Record Banking. BACKGROUND Healthcare is often ineffective and costs are steadily rising. This is in a large part due to the inaccessibility of medical and health data stored in multiple silos. Furthermore, in most cases molecular differences between individuals that result in different suscepti...

This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and dispro-This paper could not have been completed without the support and encouragement that we received from Shivajirao Patil and Jamshee...

The effectiveness of community organizations depends on the existence of pillars of good governance like, participation, accountability, transparency, predictability and rule of law. Effective participation of members in their organizations ensures the vigilance, which is essential to create sense of responsibility among the board and the personnel. This paper therefore, aims at assessing the g...

BACKGROUND To perform out-of-hours primary care, Dutch general practitioners (GPs) have organised themselves in large-scale GP cooperatives. Roughly, two models of out-of-hours care can be distinguished; GP cooperatives working separate from the hospital emergency department (ED) and GP cooperatives integrated with the hospital ED. Research has shown differences in care utilisation between thes...

This article describes the organizational characteristics of the UNIMED medical cooperative in Brazil. After an overview of UNIMED's share in the current health plan market, the author analyzes its organizational structure, historical evolution, and contractual regimen with member physicians, including the formula used to calculate the payment schedule for physician services. The plan currently...

Agricultural cooperatives are producer-owned and controlled organizations to improve farmers’ livelihoods by correcting market failure. They support collective activities where individual incentives insufficient produce public goods. The government of Nepal has been investing economic resources in this sector, prioritizing as part a strategy for poverty reduction. This study examines poor acces...

Qualifying types represent a new approach to modifying the behaviour of instances of other types in a general way, in the form of components which can be designed and implemented without a prior knowledge of the types to be modified or their implementations. This paper illustrates the idea by showing how they can be used to program various standard synchronisation problems, including mutual exc...

Industry cluster and supply chain are in focus of every countries which rely on knowledge-based economy. Both focus on improving the competitiveness of firm in the industry in the different aspect. This paper tries to illustrate how the industry cluster can increase the supply chain performance. Then, the proposed methodology concentrates on the collaboration and knowledge exchange in supply ch...