The Armenia Social Investment Fund supports communities’ efforts to improve local infrastructure during Armenia’s economic transition away from central planning. In Armenia the social fund encourages communities to organize projects that rehabilitate primary schools and water facilities, financing approximately 90 percent of initiatives that communities design and implement. This study consider...

BACKGROUND Consultation with cardiologists may improve the quality of ambulatory care and reduce disparities for patients with heart disease. We assessed the use of cardiology consultations and the associated quality by race/ethnicity, gender, insurance status, and site of care. METHODS AND RESULTS In a retrospective cohort, we examined electronic records of 9761 adults with coronary artery d...

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a major public health problem in developed countries.1–3 It is a significant burden to patients, healthcare providers, and society.2–4 Several hospital-based reports have documented that a high proportion of patients with CHF have normal left ventricular (LV) systolic function,5 and 4 different epidemiological investigations further confirmed that nearly half o...

Introduction The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) provides flexi-fund (a financing mechanism enabling pooling of money from fixed budget heads to be flexibly used as per local needs) to states and districts for paying for urgent but discreet expenses pertaining to maintenance of health infrastructure and provision of services at district, block and village level. Decisions on use of such fu...

In order to increase compliance with The Joint Commission's Congestive Heart Failure Core Measures, a rule based clinical decision support system (CDSS) was developed and deployed at a community hospital in our health system. We evaluated the performance of the CDSS in identifying patients with primary congestive heart failure (CHF)and identified problems encountered with its introduction. Perf...

BACKGROUND Despite the implementation of various initiatives to address low enrollment in voluntary micro health insurance (MHI) schemes in sub-Saharan Africa, the problem of low enrollment remains unresolved. The lack of process evaluations of such interventions makes it difficult to ascertain whether their poor results are because of design failures or implementation weaknesses. OBJECTIVE I...

OBJECTIVES We sought to characterize the predictors of incident congestive heart failure (CHF), as determined by central adjudication, in a community-based elderly population. BACKGROUND The elderly constitute a growing proportion of patients admitted to the hospital with CHF, and CHF is a leading source of morbidity and mortality in this group. Elderly patients differ from younger individual...

The Armenian Social Investment Fund supports communities’ efforts to improve local infrastructure during Armenia’s economic transition away from central planning, financing community-designed and -implemented projects to rehabilitate primary schools, water systems, and other infrastructure. This article considers the targeting, household impact, and community effects of the social fund’s activi...

introduction: the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of patients with congestive heart failure (chf) have been described by a number of previous studies, but very little information is available on this issue in iran. this study aimed to delineate the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of iranian patients hospitalized with chf. methods: during an observational, analytical, descrip...

This article presents research findings into the effectiveness of an innovative equity fund approach to improving access to public sector health services for the poor in Kirivong Operational Health District in Cambodia. The operational health district is the lowest organizational level in the Cambodian health system, providing services through health centres and a single referral hospital. An e...