background: in today's competitive world, organizations' survival and success depends on satisfying customer needs and ex­pec­tations. this is particularly important in health care sector where quality of service and customer relations are the key suc­cess factors. the purpose of this research was to determine whether there was a relationship between patient satisfaction and loyalty to the serv...

This paper compares costs for caring for patients according to common diagnosis groups in Australian public teaching, public non-teaching and private hospitals. Generally, the costs for general surgical procedures are highest in public teaching hospitals, followed by public non-teaching hospitals, and are lowest in private hospitals. However, the private sector is more expensive than the public...

In-house consultation is a well-known method to improve diagnostic accuracy and agreement, but the technique has not been well studied. We reviewed the results of in-house consultation in a large private hospital practice setting for a 1-month period and determined its effect on diagnostic accuracy using the final sign-out as the "gold standard." During this 1-month period, 352 cases were revie...

This paper deals with the experience gained in the area of poverty reduction and private sector development in Georgia. The Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Programme approved by the President of Georgia in 2003 has never been implemented because the Georgian Government had neither the will nor the ability to launch its implementation. During the Presidential and Parliamentary electio...

Attacks against the information flowing on the Internet cause a serious security threat nowadays, and force the developers to consider the system security aspects. This paper presents the use and suitability of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in the prevention of security breaches. An Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) platform is presented and integration with VPN is studied as a case stud...