Attributes and weights in health care priority setting: a systematic review of what counts and to what extent

In most societies resources are insufficient to provide everyone with all the health care they want. In practice, this means that some people are given priority over others. On what basis should priority be given? In this paper we are interested in the general public's views on this question. We set out to synthesis what the literature has found as a whole regarding which attributes or factors the general public think should count in priority setting and what weight they should receive. A systematic review was undertaken (in August 2014) to address these questions based on empirical studies that elicited stated preferences from the general public. Sixty four studies, applying eight methods, spanning five continents met the inclusion criteria. Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) and Person Trade-off (PTO) were the most popular standard methods for preference elicitation, but only 34% of all studies calculated distributional weights, mainly using PTO. While there is heterogeneity, results suggest the young are favoured over the old, the more severely ill are favoured over the less severely ill, and people with self-induced illness or high socioeconomic status tend to receive lower priority. In those studies that considered health gain, larger gain is universally preferred, but at a diminishing rate. Evidence from the small number of studies that explored preferences over different components of health gain suggests life extension is favoured over quality of life enhancement; however this may be reversed at the end of life. The majority of studies that investigated end of life care found weak/no support for providing a premium for such care. The review highlights considerable heterogeneity in both methods and results. Further methodological work is needed to achieve the goal of deriving robust distributional weights for use in health care priority setting.12 page(s

Knowledge-based platform for the provisioning system

The study examined the effectiveness and application of the tacit knowledge in the area of service delivery and order provisioning. The selected organization for this study is a corporate telecommunication body namely Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) and their specific customer called Government Integrated Telecommunication Network (GITN). The study was conducted on the chosen domain and organizations due to the special business arrangement which is based on wholesale approach between TM and GITN. It is noted that the current Order Management System (OMS) in TM is inefficient to provide the required analysis and real-time status reports of the service delivery due to its poor handling of bulk service orders. The real-time analysis and service delivery reports in relation to service provisioning are vital drivers to TM management for the decision making process. It is the key objective of this study to propose a solution to improve TM current business process particularly in the area of tracking and monitoring. The approach proposed in this study is to make use of the tacit knowledge acquired from the experts at ground level. In the process of leveraging the underlying tacit knowledge in TM day-to-day business process, the study requires the process of elicitation, adoption of effective interview technique, codification of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and building up appropriate system rules for the prototype. In general, the results have shown an acceptable improvement especially in the project management of service delivery area. The findings of this study are sufficient to encourage further work on the research model. Several recommendations are presented for future research. (Author's abstract

Economism and its Limits

Articl

The efficiency and effectiveness of utilizing diagrams in interviews: an assessment of participatory diagramming and graphic elicitation

Abstract Background This paper focuses on measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of two diagramming methods employed in key informant interviews with clinicians and health care administrators. The two methods are 'participatory diagramming', where the respondent creates a diagram that assists in their communication of answers, and 'graphic elicitation', where a researcher-prepared diagram is used to stimulate data collection. Methods These two diagramming methods were applied in key informant interviews and their value in efficiently and effectively gathering data was assessed based on quantitative measures and qualitative observations. Results Assessment of the two diagramming methods suggests that participatory diagramming is an efficient method for collecting data in graphic form, but may not generate the depth of verbal response that many qualitative researchers seek. In contrast, graphic elicitation was more intuitive, better understood and preferred by most respondents, and often provided more contemplative verbal responses, however this was achieved at the expense of more interview time. Conclusion Diagramming methods are important for eliciting interview data that are often difficult to obtain through traditional verbal exchanges. Subject to the methodological limitations of the study, our findings suggest that while participatory diagramming and graphic elicitation have specific strengths and weaknesses, their combined use can provide complementary information that would not likely occur with the application of only one diagramming method. The methodological insights gained by examining the efficiency and effectiveness of these diagramming methods in our study should be helpful to other researchers considering their incorporation into qualitative research designs

A Sustainability Catalogue for Software Modelling

Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of our future generations. It covers five different dimensions: environmental, economic, social, technical, and individual. Such dimensions are also of interest for software. For example, memory and power efficiency have an impact on the environmental dimension, the reduction of costs in software development and evolution relates to the economic dimension, the use of software for general improvement of people’s lives affects the social dimension, the software’s ability to cooperate with other systems impacts the technical dimension, and the improvement of well-being of individuals relates to the individual dimension. These various dimensions and their properties impact on each other and on the base requirements of a system. Therefore, well-informed design decisions require improved support to reason on such intra- and inter-relationships and impacts, early in development. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a catalog of sustainability requirements for later reuse during the software development process. The envisioned solution involves using requirement engineering activities to address sustainability in the early stages of the software development. The first step towards a solution was to perform a (agile) systematic mapping study in order to gain a complete and profound knowledge about the existing sustainability and requirement engineering techniques. This study was the base of our work. Our final artifact is a sustainability catalogue. This catalogue addresses four out of the five dimensions of sustainability, as well as their qualities and relationships. We did not treat the individual dimension, for sake of simplicity and time constraints, although we consider that some of its properties are included in the social dimension. The catalogue was developed using the iStar framework, and it was implemented in the piStar Tool. Such catalogue offers a generic approach that can be instantiated for particular application domains, and for any combination of dimensions. Hence, this work will contribute to the field of sustainable software development

An analysis of design for manufacturing requirements for managing aerospace manufacturing knowledge

In the manufacturing lifecycle of aerospace products, large amounts of data are generated throughout the activities involved. Much of this data contains useful knowledge for engineers to improve various aspects of Design for Manufacturing (DFM) of new or existing products that may help reduce defects in future manufacturing activities. An investigation is carried out at a large UK based manufacturer of aerospace products that aims to introduce an improved approach that supports design engineering activities to make use of the ‘data’ generated to drive the number of re-occurring defects down. This paper particularly focuses on analyzing the requirements for introducing a solution identified from questionnaires, observations and stakeholder reviews and proposes a framework of the components to enable its implementation. The research discussed the requirements and concludes the main findings toward implementing a fully integrated solution at the collaborating company in order to improve data usefulness and effectiveness