BACKGROUND Health information exchanged between friends or family members can influence decision making, both for routine health questions and for serious health issues. A health information broker is a person to whom friends and family turn for advice or information on health-related topics. Characteristics and online behaviors of health information brokers have not previously been studied in ...

InfoSleuth1 is an agent-based system for information discovery and retrieval in an open and dynamically changing environment. It implements a brokering function which combines reasoning over both the advertised syntax and semantics of agents in the InfoSleuth domain. The brokering function in a distributed or agent-based system matches processes requiring a service (requesters) with processes t...

This Issue Brief reports on changes in manufacturers' prescription drug prices during the first three months of 2004 (January through March) for the brand name prescription drugs most widely used by Americans age 50 and over. This report is the first quarterly update in an ongoing study of changes in drug manufacturer prices-that is, manufacturers' prices charged for drugs they sold to wholesal...

The private for-profit sector is an important source of treatment for malaria. However, private patients face high prices for the recommended treatment for uncomplicated malaria, artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs), which makes them more likely to receive cheaper, less effective non-artemisinin therapies (nATs). This study seeks to better understand consumer antimalarial prices by document...

BACKGROUND The role of health broker is a relatively new one in public health. Health brokers aim to create support for efforts to optimise health promotion in complex or even "wicked" public health contexts by facilitating intersectoral collaborations and by exchanging knowledge with different stakeholders. The current study aimed to explore the role of health brokers, by examining the motivat...

Content-based Publish-Subscribe (CBPS) is a widely used communication paradigm where publishers “publish” messages and a set of subscribers receive these messages based on their interests through filtering and routing by an intermediate set of brokers. CBPS has proven to be suitable for many-to-many communication offering flexibility and efficiency in communications between a dynamic set of pub...

The DiffServ architecture uses automated agents known as Bandwidth Brokers for provisioning, allocating and managing QoS resources within domains as weil as communicating with agents of other domains so that QoS guarantees can be provided across domains. The Bandwidth Brokers attempt to establish an end-to-end Quality of Service through signaling between each other. This leads to an implicit tr...