OBJECTIVES We hypothesised that among nursing home decedents, nursing home for-profit status and poor quality-of-care ratings, as well as patient characteristics, would lower the likelihood of transfer to hospital prior to heart disease death. METHODS Using death certificates from a large metropolitan area (Tampa Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area) for 1998-2002, we geocoded residential st...

Effective workplace violence (WPV) prevention programs are essential, yet challenging to implement in healthcare. The aim of this study was to identify major barriers to implementation of effective violence prevention programs. After reviewing the related literature, the authors describe their research methods and analysis and report the following seven themes as major barriers to effective imp...

The improvement of quality care is a major goal for modern healthcare. Quality often measured through readmission rates specific conditions such as heart failure, pneumonia, total arthroplasty the knee/hip, etc. This data has been used by Center Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to adjust reimbursement hospitals with excessive readmissions. Different hospital operations management models pos...

BACKGROUND A global budgeting system helps control the growth of healthcare spending by setting expenditure ceilings. However, the hospital global budget implemented in Taiwan in 2002 included a special provision: drug expenditures are reimbursed at face value, while other expenditures are subject to discounting. That gives hospitals, particularly those that are for-profit, an incentive to incr...

The liberalization of the worldwide business and growing consumer demands, request the qualityoriented food production. Access to great quality food has been man's venture from the earlier days. A standout amongst the most difficult errands in today's sustenance industry is controlling the item‟s quality all through the food supply chain. The objective of this study is to optimize an inventory ...

We demonstrate a negative relationship between pro-market reforms and the sustainability of superior profits in an emerging economy. The decline in sustainability of superior profits shows that pro-market reforms bring significant threats in addition to the various opportunities such as greater availability of production factors and greater freedom to enter and operate businesses highlighted in...

This paper investigates the effect of capacity constraints on the sustainability of collusion in markets subject to cyclical demand fluctuations. In the absence of capacity constraints (i.e. a limiting case of our model), Haltiwanger and Harrington (1991) show that firms find it more difficult to collude during periods of decreasing demand. We find that this prediction can be overturned if firm...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of more timely data entry and greater accuracy in guiding respondents through skip patterns. Further benefi...

BACKGROUND Healthcare-seeking behaviour in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) has been investigated to a limited extent, and not in developing countries. Switches between different health sectors may interrupt glycaemic control, affecting health. The aim of the study was to explore healthcare-seeking behaviour, including use of complementary alternative medicine (CAM) and traditional healers,...