The aim of the study was to determine drug utilization according to Croatian counties, and to identify the causes of the possible between-county utilization variation. Zagreb Institute of Public Health in collaboration with the Croatian Drug Agency collected and analyzed data on outpatient utilization of the six main Anatomic-Therapeutic-Chemical (ATC) drug groups. Data on the number and size o...

This study used national Medicaid data from 1994-2003 to investigate trends in noninstitutional drug utilization and expenditures in the Medicaid Program. We found that there was a substantial increase in both drug utilization and expenditures during this timeframe. Increased utilization resulted from increases in Medicaid enrollment, the mean number of prescriptions per enrollee, mean nominal ...

Although evaluation is now an integral part of the design and implementation of public programs in many countries, there is growing recognition that the utilization of evaluation results for improving implementation and decision making, particularly in developing countries, is limited. The objective of this paper is to describe the process by which the external impact evaluation has been used t...

OBJECTIVE To examine the merits of the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) control index together with prior asthma health-care utilization from administrative data in predicting future acute asthma health-care utilization. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. POPULATION A total of 4,788 adult asthma patients aged 17 to 93 years who completed a baseline evaluation and had at least 6 ...

As self-medication is a worldwide problem of public health, this article had as objective to evaluate the behavior of the future health professionals with regard to the drug utilization, particularly, to the self-medication practice. 223 academic students from a public university in Recife City were interviewed, selected by proportional share in each course. A questionnaire on the drug utilizat...

Although stakeholder-based evaluation has been fairly well developed in the general program evaluation literature, it remains barely recognized in training evaluation practice. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of multiple stakeholder perceptions about training evaluation in an organizational context. Extending prior empirical work that described differences in stakeholder pe...

Sustainability evaluation of the process of water abstraction, distribution, and use for irrigation can contribute to the policy of decision making in irrigation development. Emergy theory and method are used to evaluate a pumping irrigation district in China. A corresponding framework for its emergy evaluation is proposed. Its emergy evaluation shows that water is the major component of inputs...

2 List of papers 3 Aims of this thesis 4 Thesis at a glance 5 Description of contributions 6 Abbreviations and definitions 7 Introduction 8 Background 9 Health 9 The international classification of functioning, disability and health (ICF) 9 Rehabilitation 10 Chronic inflammatory arthritis 10 History of rheumatological care 12 Rheumatological rehabilitation teams 13 Evaluation of modern rheumtol...

BACKGROUND The research community relies heavily on measures of healthcare utilization from household surveys to understand health seeking choices and to evaluate interventions in developing countries. Such measures are known to suffer from recall problems but there is limited evidence of whether the method of data collection affects evaluation findings. We compared the results of a randomized ...