E-marketing strategies exploiting social media for Islamic banking

The concept of e-marketing is one which has gained increasing interest within Islamic businesses in recent years. Amin [3] asserts that one of the most critical issues to consider is the legal and moral aspects of e- marketing and the extent to which they fit comfortably within principle notions of Islam and Sharia law. He states that "e-business is a permissible means of doing business provided it is performed in the boundary of Shariah Islamiyyah”. By this he means that any form of e- marketing must clearly demonstrate the key principles of Islam, meaning that marketing must be devoid of any contentious or exaggerated claims and there must be no excessive risk. Of course, one of the principal features of marketing as noted by Kotler and Keller [46] is that marketing is known for accentuating the benefits and features of products and services, and downplaying the negative attributes which potentially could lead to a consumer making an informed decision on the basis of this unbalanced presentation. Arguably, this presents a form of risk which may be at odds with the fundamental tenets of Islam. This paper presents a critical literature review of alternative e-marketing approaches.peer-reviewe

The extended mixture distribution survival tree based analysis for clustering and patient pathway prognostication in a stroke care unit

In our previous work we proposed a special class of survival distribution called Mixture distribution survival trees, which are constructed by approximating different nodes in the tree by distinct types of mixture distributions to achieve more improvement in the likelihood function and thus the improved within node homogeneity. We proposed its applications in modelling hospital length of stay and clustering patients into clinically meaningful patient groups, where partitioning was based on covariates representing patient characteristics such as gender, age at the time of admission, and primary diagnosis code. This paper proposes extended Mixture distribution survival trees and demonstrates its applications to patient pathway prognostication and to examine the relationship between hospital length of stay and/or treatment outcome. 5 year retrospective data of patients admitted to Belfast City Hospital with a diagnosis of stroke is used to illustrate the approach.peer-reviewe

Phase-type survival trees and mixed distribution survival trees for clustering patients' hospital length of stay

Clinical investigators, health professionals and managers are often interested in developing criteria for clustering patients into clinically meaningful groups according to their expected length of stay. In this paper, we propose two novel types of survival trees; phase-type survival trees and mixed distribution survival trees, which extend previous work on exponential survival trees. The trees are used to cluster the patients with respect to length of stay where partitioning is based on covariates such as gender, age at the time of admission and primary diagnosis code. Likelihood ratio tests are used to determine optimal partitions. The approach is illustrated using nationwide data available from the English Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database on stroke-related patients, aged 65 years and over, who were discharged from English hospitals over a 1-year period.peer-reviewe

Costing hospital resources for stroke patients using phase-type models

Optimising resources in healthcare facilities is essential for departments to cope with the growing population’s requirements. An aspect of such performance modelling involves investigating length of stay, which is a key performance indicator. Stroke disease costs the United Kingdom economy seven billion pounds a year and stroke patients are known to occupy long periods of time in acute and long term beds in hospital as well as requiring support from social services. This may be viewed as an inefficient use of resources. Thrombolysis is a therapy which uses a clot-dispersing drug which is known to decrease the institutionalisation of eligible stroke patients if administered 3 h after incident but it is costly to administer to patients. In this paper we model the cost of treating stroke patients within a healthcare facility using a mixture of Coxian phase type model with multiple absorbing states. We also discuss the potential benefits of increasing the usage of thrombolysis and if these benefits balance the expense of administering the drug.peer-reviewe

Andrographis paniculata transcriptome provides molecular insights into tissue-specific accumulation of medicinal diterpenes

A summary of SSRs identified in leaf and root transcriptomes. (DOCX 11 kb