The objective of the study was to evaluate the economic consequences of a general childhood vaccination programme against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) in Sweden. A retrospective pre-vaccination annual cohort of 0-4-y-old children was compared with an annual cohort of the same age group after a complete implemented vaccination program against Hib. The cost analysis shows that vaccination ...

BACKGROUND The generic dispensing ratio (GDR)-the number of generic fills divided by the total number of prescriptions-is a standard performance metric on which pharmacy benefit designs and their managers are routinely evaluated. Higher GDRs are considered important because they consistently produce lower prescription drug costs. OBJECTIVE To (a) quantify the relationship between GDR and gros...

BACKGROUND Childhood obesity and its consequences are a growing threat to national economies and health services. The aim of this study was to determine associations between waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) as a measure of central obesity, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and absenteeism of primary school children in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. METHODS Cross-sectional data ...

BACKGROUND The burden of health care expenditure on national budgets has increased dramatically over the past decade. A pilot study in our hospital demonstrated that many unnecessary diagnostic tests were performed routinely. The aim of this study was to reduce the costs of unnecessary diagnostic tests. METHODS All diagnostic costs between 2006 and 2008 of the internal medicine department of ...

proposing a robust designed facility location is one of the most effective ways to hedge against unexpected disruptions and failures in a transportation network system. this paper considers the combined facility location/network design problem with regard to transportation link disruptions and develops a mixed integer linear programming formulation to model it. with respect to the probability o...

Hazardous waste management incorporates collection, separation, treatment, recycling and disposal of hazardous wastes. In this paper, a new multi-objective mixed integer model is presented for hazardous waste collection problem. The model aims to minimize transportation and construction costs, and environmental and population risks in hazardous waste management systems. This model is applied in...

BACKGROUND To date there have been no studies identifying and comparing the component costs to treat a large number of diseases for hospitalized inpatients. METHODS Hospital costs were analyzed for 486 diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) relating to >1.3 million patient discharges from 60 University Hospital members of the University HealthSystems Consortium. For each DRG, length of stay, total c...

The objective in traditional scheduling is usually time based. Minimizing the makespan, total flow times, total tardi costs, etc. are instances of these objectives. In manufacturing, processing each job entails a cost paying and price receiving. Thus, the objective should include some notion of managing the flow of cash. We have defined two new objectives: maximization of average and minimum av...

Generic prescribing and generic substitution are mechanisms for reducing the cost of drugs. The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which generic prescribing by private medical practitioners and generic substitution by private pharmacists is practised in South Africa and to estimate the potential savings from these two practices. Prescriptions from 10 pharmacists were collected on...