INTRODUCTION Health information systems (HIS) are considered fundamental for the efficient delivery of high quality health care. However, a large number of legal and practical constraints influence the design and introduction of such systems. The inability to quantify and analyse situations with credible data and to use data in planning and managing service delivery plagues Africa. Establishing...

New developments in molecular neuropathology have evoked increased demands for postmortem human brain tissue. The New South Wales Tissue Resource Centre (TRC) at The University of Sydney has grown from a small tissue collection into one of the leading international brain banking facilities, which operates with best practice and quality control protocols. The focus of this tissue collection is o...

In many logistic systems for less than truckload (LTL) shipments, transportation of goods from one origin to its destination is made through collection tours to a hub and delivery tours from the same or another hub, while the goods are shipped between two hubs using Full Truckload (FTL) shipments. Therefore, managers need to determine the location of the hubs, the allocation of non-hub nodes, a...

We analyze a network design problem for a closed-loop supply chain that integrates the collection of the used products with the distribution of the new products. We present a mixed integer nonlinear facility location-inventory-pricing model to decide on the optimal locations of the facilities, inventory amounts, prices for new products and incentive values for the collection of right amount of ...

Due to the rise of music streaming platforms, huge collections of music are now available to users on various devices. Within these collections, users aim to find and explore songs based on certain criteria reflecting their current and context-specific preferences. Currently, users are limited to either using search facilities or relying on recommender systems that suggest suitable tracks or ar...

BACKGROUND The Yashoda program, named after a legendary foster-mother in Indian mythology, under the Norway-India Partnership Initiative was launched as a pilot program in 2008 to improve the quality of maternal and neonatal care at facilities in select districts of India. Yashodas were placed mainly at district hospitals, which are high delivery load facilities, to provide support and care to ...

Full-text information retrieval systems have traditionally been designed for archival environments. They often provide little or no support for adding new documents to an existing document collection, requiring instead that the entire collection be re-indexed. Modern applications, such as information filtering, operate in dynamic environments that require frequent additions to document collecti...

Health information systems are an important planning and monitoring tool for public health services, but may lack information from the private health sector. In this fourth article in a series on district decision-making for health, we assessed the extent of maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH)-related data sharing between the private and public sectors in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, I...

Tanzania is currently implementing the antiretroviral treatment programme, and has a target of putting about 400,000 eligible HIV infected individuals on treatment by 2008. This will involve screening a large number of people, which will require non-laboratory personnel to be involved in doing HIV testing. In order to guarantee reliable and quality HIV test results, there is a need to ensure th...