Pay-for-performance (P4P) is the provision of financial incentives to healthcare providers based on pre-specified performance targets. P4P has been used as a policy tool to improve healthcare provision globally. However, researchers tend to cluster into those working on high or low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), with still limited knowledge exchange, potentially ...

This paper proposes building knowledge-based systems using a programming system based on a very-high-level language. It gives an overview of such a programming system, BC, and shows how BC can be used to implement knowledge representation features, providing as examples, automatic maintenance of inverse links and property inheritance. The specification language of BC can be extended to include ...

Belief networks, such as Bayes nets, have emerged as an effective knowledge representation and inference engine in artificial intelligence and expert systems research. Their effectiveness is due to the ability to explicitly integrate domain knowledge in the network structure and to reduce a joint probability distribution to conditionally independence relationships. Current research in contentba...

When it comes to robotic agents operating in an uncertain world, a major concern in knowledge representation is to better relate high-level logical accounts of belief and action to the low-level probabilistic sensorimotor data. Perhaps the most general formalism for dealing with degrees of belief and, in particular, how such beliefs should evolve in the presence of noisy sensing and acting is t...

This paper describes E-DEVICE, an extensible active knowledge base system (KBS) that supports the processing of event-driven, production, and deductive rules into the same active OODB system. E-DEVICE provides the infrastructure for the smooth integration of various declarative rule types, such as production and deductive rules, into an active OODB system that supports low-level event-driven ru...

The objective of this study was to identify risk factors for low birth weight in singleton live born infants in Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, in 2003, based on data from the Information System on Live Births. The study used both classical multivariate and multilevel logistic regression. Risk factors were evaluated at two levels: individual (live births) and contextual (micro-regions). At the...

PURPOSE To determine the causes of low vision in an elderly population attended by a university visual rehabilitation service and to check for the use of prescribed optical aids. METHOD A cross-sectional study was carried out on patients aged 60 years or over attending for the first time a university low vision service in 2001. Ophthalmic reevaluation and interview were performed by means of ...

objective: high prevalence of tobacco consumption in childbearing ages is an important topic of consideration as its ill effects have influences on fertility. worldwide studies have shown that general knowledge on fertility issues is low. aim of the current study was to assess tobacco harm knowledge and attitude in infertile couples referring to the avicenna center. materials and methods: this ...

introduction: the ultimate objective of scientific activities in organizations and universities is to ensure continuous expansion of these activities and to follow an ongoing knowledge improvement and development trail. hence, this study was performed to investigate the knowledge management score between students of isfahan university of medical sciences. methods: in this descriptive study, the...