the article by brenna and spandonaro on interregional mobility for acute hospital care in italy raises important issues concerning social and territorial equity in a healthcare system. based on regions and private providers’ strategic behavior, the hypothesis adopted to explain patient cross-border mobility (cbm), demonstrated by statistical analysis, may be further explored using qualitative m...

OBJECTIVE To explore views of service providers caring for injured people on: the extent to which services meet patients' needs and their perspectives on factors contributing to any identified gaps in service provision. DESIGN Qualitative study nested within a quantitative multicentre longitudinal study assessing longer term impact of unintentional injuries in working age adults. Sampling fra...

Price war, as an important factor in undercutting competitors and attracting customers, has spurred considerable work that analyzes such conflict situation. However, in most of these studies, quality of service (QoS), as an important decision-making criterion, has been neglected. Furthermore, with the rise of service-oriented architectures, where players may offer different levels of QoS for di...

Establishing trust is one of the most challenging issues in emerging cloud computing area. It is becoming increasingly complex for cloud users to make distinction (with respect to trustworthiness) among service providers offering similar kinds of services. There must be some mechanisms in the hands of users to determine trustworthiness of service providers so that they can select service provid...

The convergence of traditional telecommunications and the Internet is creating new network-based service delivery opportunities for telecommunications companies carriers, service providers, and network equipment providers. Voice over Wireless IP is one of the most exciting new developments emerging within the telephony market. It is set to revolutionize the delivery of mobile voice Services and...

Background The government of Ghana introduced the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in 2004 with the goal of achieving universal coverage within 5 years. Evidence, however, shows that expanding NHIS coverage and especially retaining members have remained a challenge. A multilevel perspective was employed as a conceptual framework and methodological tool to examine why enrolment and retent...

As computer systems are becoming increasingly distributed and complex in nature, services are emerging as a promising paradigm for offering processes and resources on demand to consumers. By relying onmachine-readable service descriptions, software agents in such systems are able to discover and invoke remote services without human intervention at run-time. This allows them to achieve complex g...

In order to provision content-based services to their users, service providers need to purchase content distribution rights from various content providers. Sometimes the creation phase of certain content categories can last longer than planed so content providers deliver the content to service providers with delays. The delayed delivery can cause financial damages and inconveniences to service ...

Today’s mobile location-based services largely depend on a free-of-charge, best effort positioning technology, called Global Positioning System (GPS) which is controlled by the US military. The European alternative Galileo will not only offer a similar best-effort system by 2020, but also a premium-rate service known as Galileo Commercial Service (CS). Galileo CS is planned to provide higher po...