BACKGROUND Delivery at health institutions under the care of trained health-care providers and utilization of postnatal cares services plays vital roles in promoting child survival and reducing the risk of maternal mortality. More than 80 % of maternal deaths can be prevented if pregnant women access to essential maternity cares like antenatal care, institutional delivery and postnatal care ser...

Multistage stochastic programming is a key technology for making decisions over time in an uncertain environment. One of the promising areas in which this technology is implementable, is medium term planning of electricity production and trading where decision makers are typically faced with uncertain parameters (such as future demands and market prices) that can be described by stochastic proc...

Remarkable advances in the fundamental knowledge about the biological basis of disease and technical advances in methods to assess genomic information have led the health care system to the threshold of personalized medicine. It is now feasible to consider strategic application of genomic information to guide patient management by being predictive, preemptive, and preventive, and enabling patie...

Bonomi AE, Wagner EH, Glasgow R, VonKorff M. Assessment of Chronic Illness Care: A practical tool for quality improvement. Health Services Research 2002; 37(3): 791-820. This article describes initial testing of the Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (ACIC), a practical quality-improvement tool to help organizations evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their delivery of care for chronic ill...

Background/introduction The Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) in Non-Human Primates (NHP) can be non-invasively opened through the use of Focused Ultrasound (FUS) in conjunction with microbubbles. This procedure allows for a targeted, transient opening in the BBB of the NHP which can be utilized to facilitate drug delivery. While FUS has been used to deliver various pharmacological compounds to promote...

The delivery of veterinary services in most of sub-Saharan Africa has undergone substantial changes, with the private sector gaining increasing recognition as an alternative to state provision. Given this policy shift, the authors argue that a better understanding of the behaviour and decision-making processes of small-scale farmers in animal health management is urgently required, to guide pol...

hydrogels are introduced to modem medicine as novel materials suitable for a variety ofbiomedical applications. studying hydrogels as novel biomaterials has become a fast-developingand exciting research field during the last two decades. these interesting biomaterials have found awide range of application including contact lenses, vehicles for drug delivery and scaffold in tissueengineering and...

Considering the growing recognition of the importance of patient engagement in healthcare decisions, research and delivery systems, it is important to ensure high quality and efficient patient engagement evaluation tools. In this commentary, we will first highlight the definition and importance of patient engagement. Then we discuss the psychometric properties of the patient engagement evaluati...

The Critical Infrastructure Protection Decision Support System (CIPDSS) project has developed a risk-informed decision support system that provides insights for making critical infrastructure protection decisions by considering many critical infrastructures and their primary interdependencies. Initiated as a proof-of-concept in August 2003, the CIPDSS project completed a prototype model and two...

We report two cases of confirmed Ebola virus disease in pregnant women, who presented at the Médecins Sans Frontières Ebola treatment centre in Guéckédou. Despite the very high risk of death, both pregnant women survived. In both cases the critical decision was made to induce vaginal delivery. We raise a number of considerations regarding the management of Ebola virus-infected pregnant women, i...