Decentralization of health systems has made Background sub-national/regional healthcare systems the backbone of healthcare delivery. These regions are tasked with the difficult responsibility of determining healthcare priorities and resource allocation amidst scarce resources. We aimed to review empirical literature that evaluated priority setting practice at the meso level of health systems. :...

This paper describes the architecture for a virtual agent and the implementation of its Affection Module. A novel affective model is proposed based on Probabilistic Fuzzy Cognitive Map to simulate the emotion transferring stimulated process, and the corresponding algorithm is presented. To testify the reasonableness and effectiveness of the affective model, we simulate by MATLAB and the give a ...

OVERVIEW: In recent years, regulations concerning the observance of environmental laws have been made stricter, particularly in the EU (European Union), but in the rest of the world community as well. To protect their brand images, it has become essential for companies to respond to requirements for improvement of product quality and accountability to the customer. That has created a demand for...

When do citizens’ voices and demands result in improved state responsiveness, transparency and accountability? First, when the citizenry is active in shaping policy priorities and demanding greater openness and responsiveness from the state. Second, if state institutions view their responsibilities to citizens as central. In reality, however, the state in many developing countries is not suffic...

This article draws some general connections between privatization and political accountability. Although the main focus of the article is to examine different types of privatization, specifically exploring the ramifications for political accountability of each type, I also engage in some speculation as to whether there are situations in which privatization might raise constitutional concerns re...

OBJECTIVE In health, accountability has since long been acknowledged as a central issue, but it remains an elusive concept. The literature on accountability spans various disciplines and research traditions, with differing interpretations. There has been little transfer of ideas and concepts from other disciplines to public health and global health. In the frame of a study of accountability of ...

BACKGROUND As effective antibiotics are becoming a scarce resource, governmental regulation is needed to promote responsible use. Implementation of antibiotic stewardship and practice guidelines in health care facilities seems to be crucial to this effort. Empirical studies suggest, however, that guidelines have limited influence on health professionals' behavior and practice. Barriers and faci...

BACKGROUND In healthcare today, decisions are made in the face of serious resource constraints. Healthcare managers are struggling to provide high quality care, manage resources effectively, and meet changing patient needs. Healthcare managers who are constantly making difficult resource decisions desire a way to improve their priority setting processes. Despite the wealth of existing priority ...

BACKGROUND As no health system can afford to provide all possible services and treatments for the people it serves, each system must set priorities. Priority setting decision makers are increasingly involving the public in policy making. This study focuses on public engagement in a key priority setting context that plagues every health system around the world: wait list management. The purpose ...

Sanitizable signatures enable a designated party to modify signed documents in a controlled way, while the derived signature still verifies. In this paper, we introduce the notion of non-interactive and public accountability. It allows a third party to determine whether a message-signature pair was issued by the signer or the sanitizer. The original notion of accountability does not satisfy Eur...