IMPORTANCE Hospitals are rapidly acquiring medical groups and physician practices. This consolidation may foster cooperation and thereby reduce expenditures, but also may lead to higher expenditures through greater use of hospital-based ambulatory services and through greater hospital pricing leverage against health insurers. OBJECTIVE To determine whether total expenditures per patient were ...

Social workers are considered a professional group at high risk of burnout. Noticing the insufficient human resource management and understaffed social work centers, Iranian social workers are faced with a considerable level of physical and mental stress, which can lead to burnout. A national study on 390 social workers was conducted. Among social workers, 10.9% had experienced burnout and 17.4...

The majority of human resource management (HRM) studies, to date, are devoted to the developed countries and there is still scarcity of research on the nuances of HRM in the developing countries. This paper looks deeper into and reviews the empirical nuances of HRM functions in the Iranian public sector. Using interviews in five Iranian ministries, key HRM features are extracted and explained i...

China's agricultural sector was the first to experience significant success from reform, but initial reform efforts in the late 1970s were directed at state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In 1978, when farmers started to experiment-secretly and illegally-with the now famous household responsibility system (HRS) in several villages in Anhui province, the government was already introducing the first s...

This study explores the level of alienation among Russian employees in state-owned and private business organizations over a period of 2 years. Based on the employment situation in Russia, employees in private companies were expected to be more alienated from their work than employees in state-owned companies. Survey data have been collected from 725 employees in five state-owned and three priv...

S urfing on the wings of time, days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. And, I found myself at a point to write you again—three months after the first issue of The IJOEM. Since then, many things happened: the Journal was welcomed by various healthcare professionals so that its Web site (www.theijoem.com and www. theijoem.org), received more than 60 000 hits almost three weeks after it ...

In this study, we use Stochastic Frontier analysis approach to estimate cost efficiency, economies of scale, and technological progress among Iranian banks from 1999 to 2012. The results show that there is a marked difference in cost efficiency before and after the recent financial sanctions against Iranian banking industry. Moreover, the results indicate that specialized government-owned banks...