Most countries are using some kinds of pharmaceutical policies, like external reference-based pricing, to control the costs of medicines. This policy could be implemented in different ways and there is no systematic method for selecting reference countries. In this study, we tried to identify and classify the factors affecting the selection of reference countries in Iran. Delphi method was empl...

daniels, porteny and urrutia et al make a good case for the idea that that public decisions ought to be made not only “in the light of” evidence but also “on the basis of” budget impact, financial protection and equity. health technology assessment (hta) should, they say, be accordingly expanded to consider matters additional to safety and cost-effectiveness. they also complain that most hta re...

Introduction It is with some regret that CBR has, since the early 1990’s, been viewed as being synonymous with Knowledge Management and especially so in commercial deployments of CBR systems. Infact, it is often the knowledge management aspect of the technology that is emaphasised and marketed with secondary references to CBR’s merits as a reasoning and learning AI technology. Whilst this analo...

When approached by a potential predator, individuals must decide when to flee. Individuals could assess risk by monitoring their distance from an approaching threat or by monitoring the expected time that the predator would take to reach them. Theory predicts, and empirical studies support the hypothesis, that some species maymaintain a temporal margin of safety and therefore monitor the expect...

In practice, in addition to the intervals xi = x i ; xi ] of possible values of inputs x1; : : : ; xn, we sometimes also know their means Ei. For such cases, we provide an explicit exact (= best possible) upper bound for the mean of the product x1 : : : xn of positive values xi. 1 Formulation of the Problem Case study: practical problem from ecology. In many ecological applications (see, e.g., ...