T he field of medicine is rushing headlong into a new, information-intensive era of practice and research. As medicine learns to wield the tools of " big data, " there is growing confidence that physicians and researchers will be able to obtain, measure, and analyze information from multiple sources, including the directly solicited views and preferences of patients. In this week's issue of Cir...

Variations in health care services have been well documented worldwide. The result is that increased health care spending is not uniformly associated with improved health. Interest in increasing the value obtained from health care investments has stimulated efforts to develop the best science and apply it to health care delivery. Advances in communications and information technology have made s...

BACKGROUND We know little about how procurement of a high-risk medical device (HRMD) affects clinical practice and outcomes. In health systems in high-income countries, and specifically those that maintain a national arthroplasty registry, procurement decisions are frequently guided by long-term clinical results, with the goal of ensuring at least standard quality of HRMDs. But in countries lik...

BACKGROUND Change management experts have emphasized the importance of establishing organizational readiness for change and recommended various strategies for creating it. Although the advice seems reasonable, the scientific basis for it is limited. Unlike individual readiness for change, organizational readiness for change has not been subject to extensive theoretical development or empirical ...

Clinical bioinformatics provides biological and medical information to allow for individualized healthcare. In this review, we describe the uses of clinical bioinformatics. After the analysis of the complete human genome sequences, clinical bioinformatics enables researchers to search online biological databases and use the biological information in their medical practices. The data obtained fr...

BACKGROUND Ethiopia has one of the highest maternal mortality in the world. Institutional delivery is the key intervention in reducing maternal mortality and complications. However, the uptake of the service has remained low and the factors which contribute to this low uptake appear to vary widely. Our study aims to determine the magnitude and identify factors affecting delivery at health insti...

The traditional "bench-to-bedside" paradigm for clinical research has been successfully used for many decades. This model of knowledge generation has led to discoveries that have enhanced the quality and length of life. The combination of changes in research practice and in health care delivery, growing complexity in decision-making, increasing use of electronic health records (EHR), and growin...