in the past, health planning in iran has been carried out in the context of short-range economic plans. although this mechanism has helped a great deal in the achievement of certain health plans however, the said scheme has been short in meeting the health objectives on a comprehensive basis. most often, the heath programs have lost their values to the priority and cost effectiveness of economi...

BACKGROUND Chronically ill people experience frequent changes in health status accompanied by multiple transitions between care settings and care providers. Discharge planning provides support services, follow-up activities, and other interventions that span pre-hospital discharge to post-hospital settings. OBJECTIVE To determine if discharge planning is effective at reducing health resource ...

We report on an application of data envelopment analysis to hospital capacity planning in Germany. This work was carried out as part of a ministry report prepared by a major German health care consulting company. Our input into this report is a first attempt to incorporate the relative economic efficiency of hospitals into the capacity planning process. The application develops a general approa...

BACKGROUND Discharge planning is a routine feature of health systems in many countries. The aim is to reduce hospital length of stay and unplanned readmission to hospital, and improve the co ordination of services following discharge from hospital thereby bridging the gap between hospital and place of discharge. Sometimes discharge planning is offered as part of an integrated package of care, w...

Many common management practices in healthcare organizations, including the practice of strategic planning, have not been subject to widespread assessment through empirical research. If management practice is to be evidence-based, evaluations of such common practices need to be undertaken. The purpose of this research is to provide evidence on the extent of strategic planning practices and the ...

Strategic preparedness planning is an important new imperative for many hospitals. Strategic preparedness planning goes beyond traditional product/market strategic planning by focusing on disaster prevention, containment, and response roles. Hospitals, because of their unique mission, size, complexity, the types of materials they handle, and the types of patients they encounter, are especially ...

Hospital discharge planning has become increasingly important in an era of prospective payment and managed care. Given the changes in tasks, decisions, and environments involved, it is important to identify how to move such planning from an art to an empirically based decisionmaking process. The authors use a decision-sciences framework to review the state-of-the-art of hospital discharge plann...

OBJECTIVES There is limited evidence of the impact of advance care planning (ACP) on outcomes. We conducted a retrospective cohort study on deaths of all patients known to a hospice in a 2.5-year period to see if use of ACP affected actual place of death, hospital use and cost of hospital care in the last year. RESULTS 969 patients were included. 550 (57%) people completed ACP. 414 (75%) achi...

BACKGROUND Home birth is available to women in Canada who meet eligibility requirements for low risk status after assessment by regulated midwives. While UK researchers have reported lower costs associated with planned home birth, there have been no published studies of the costs of home versus hospital birth in Canada. METHODS Costs for all women planning home birth with a regulated midwife ...