Future health care systems will involve a network of heterogeneous resources providing different levels of service and will comprise of a physical and a virtual decision and control layer. The initial results presented here will lead to health care delivery with on-line decision making in order to meet QoS requirements and management targets.

Introduction: New models of primary healthcare delivery recently implemented in Ontario are designed to improve after-hours accessibility. This study examined whether the six-month prevalence of emergency department and walk-in clinic use differed among patients of eight Family Health Network (FHN), 16 Family Health Group (FHG) and 12 fee-for-service (FFS) physicians in one city. Michelle Howar...

Health professionals providing health-care services must have the relevant competencies and clinical experiences needed to improve population health outcomes in different contexts. Current models of health profession education often fail to produce a fit-for-purpose workforce ready and willing to provide relevant, quality care to underserved communities. Evidence is emerging that community-enga...

There is a strong tradition of interaction, relationship and network research in the industrial and manufacturing areas of business-to-business markets (Håkansson, 1982, Turnbull and Valla, 1986, Dwyer, Schurr and Oh, 1987, Ford, 1990, 1997, Håkansson and Snehota, 1995). It is accepted that investigation of service business-to-business markets is relatively underdeveloped (although there are no...

land- phone, like mobile, internet and fax is a communication device and has network externality effect. thus as the penetration coefficient increases, the network effect improves. the transmission of information via the word of mouth is the main source of enhancing the network externalities coefficient. in this article we have investigated the factors affecting the network externality coeffici...

Unemployment and financial struggles affect big and small communities alike. The current economic climate, coupled with changes to the health care environment, presents a unique opportunity for health care providers and community leaders to collaborate, integrate and network. The benefits of health networks are and can be tremendous during times of economic hardships. It takes great effort to a...

Formalized rural health service delivery networks are emerging as an over-arching response to the attrition of rural surgical and maternity services in Canada. In effective networks, there is strong collaborative leadership, form follows function, core network elements are identified and site-specific variations are accommodated to meet the surgical needs of the population in each geographic ca...