s a key part of the overall government A I crackdown on healthcare fraud and 1 abuse, the Healthcare Integrity and • I Protection Data Bank (HIPDB) is scheduled to open in the fall of 1999 (although its opening has been delayed once and may be delayed again). The HIPDB is, in many respects, a more refined version of the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which was established by the Health...

While healthcare is the biggest service industry on the globe it has yet to realize the full potential of ehealth, which is in stark contrast to other e-business initiatives such as e-government and eeducation, e-finance or e-commerce. This is due to many reasons including the fact that the healthcare industry is faced with many complex challenges in trying to deliver cost-effective, highvalue,...

Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 10, No. 10, October 2004 1887 SARS also imposed physical and psychological concerns on the healthcare workers. During the later stage of the SARS epidemic, the Taiwan government offered special financial assistance to hospitals and healthcare workers as an incentive to help fight SARS. The country’s National Health Insurance program compensa...

Innovation policy often focuses on fortifying the incentives of firms that develop and sell new products by offering them lucrative rights to exclude competitors from the market. Regulators also rely on these same firms-and on similar incentives-to develop information about the effects of their products in patients, despite their obvious conflict of interest. The result may be a distorted under...

OBJECTIVE A rapid survey was carried out in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar District of Punjab state in India to ascertain health seeking behavior and out-of-pocket health expenditures. METHODS Using multistage cluster sampling design, 1,008 households (28 clusters x 36 households in each cluster) were selected proportionately from urban and rural areas. Households were selected through a house-to...

In a recent article in this journal Simon-Tuval, Horev and Kaplan argue that in order to improve the protection of consumers there might be a need to impose a threshold on the medical loss ratio (MLR) for voluntary health insurance (VHI) in Israel [1]. Their argument is that VHI in Israel covers several essential services that are not covered by the mandatory benefits package due to budget cons...

The healthcare industry is unique when compared to other industries in that multiple stakeholders manage healthcare services. Consumers are the ultimate users of these services; however, they have relatively little influence on their own health service choices. The industry is changing rapidly with new technologies making access to healthcare information via the Internet and other sources easie...

Background Access to appropriate and affordable healthcare is needed to achieve better health outcomes in Africa. However, access to healthcare remains low, especially among the poor. In Zambia, poor access exists despite the policy by the government to remove user fees in all primary healthcare facilities in the public sector. The paper has two main objectives: (i) to examine the factors assoc...