Journal of

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Background: Priority Setting is necessary. There are different ways of priority Setting. How they are used depend on the situation of the country.

Material and Methods: This research is literature review. Google Scholar, Medline, Iranmedex, SID, Irandoc data base are used to gathering data.

Results: According to this study, there are various standard ways to priority setting such as Essential national health research ( ENHR), combined method, The commission on health research for Development (COHRED), Five-Step Process of the Ad Hoc Committee on Health Research. These methods have their own characteristics. These methods vary from one country to another . However the final impact is the same.

Conclusion: The result shows that it is useful to know about priority setting and strength and weakness of them. Combined method is the best way because it has the strength of other methods and corrects weakness of them. 

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Background: Priority setting and resource allocation are assumed to be the most important issues of health-sector and fairness thereof requires considering various criteria. This study was performed to identify the criteria used for priority setting and resource allocation in the world health systems through comprehensive review.
 
Materials and Methods: Cochrane, PubMed and SCOPUS database were searched systematically from Jan.1,2005 to Oct.10,2016. The English articles with codified and specified qualitative and quantitative criteria in the resource allocation context in health sector were included in the study. The obtained data were synthetized thematically.
 
Results: Overall, 9162 papers were extracted. At the beginning of review of the included articles, 9089 papers were removed due to duplication and also based on the title. The abstracts of the remained papers were reviewed and 17 papers were removed. Full text of 59 remained papers were reviewed and based on matching with the inclusion criteria, 34 other papers were removed, too, and ultimately 25 papers were included in the final phase of the study. Extracted criteria were categorized into four dimentions based on economic, management, structural and contextual, out of which the most frequent ones were related to cost, health system goals, local capacity and disease status, respectively.
 

Conclusion: In this study, the most important criteria used by policy makers and decision makers of health system in the world were extracted for priority setting and resource allocation. The results indicated that in the world, priority setting and resource allocation in the health system is made mainly based on criteria such as cost-effectiveness, disease status, equity/equality and the need. 

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Background: The waiting list is a list of selected patients in the surgical queue. If demand exceeds capacity, the waiting list grows rapidly, which may lead to unacceptable waiting for patients, especially those in need of acute medical care. Patients waiting for heart surgery are placed on the waiting list for surgery, and sometimes the waiting time is longer than patients expect. Reducing the waiting time for medical services, including heart surgery, is one of the challenges of the health system. In this regard, the present study was performed by identifying an effective solution to reduce the queue length of patients undergoing cardiac surgery.
 
Materials and Methods: In this article, the process of scheduling open heart surgery at Shahid Rajaei Hospital was reviewed and improved with a discrete event simulation approach in Arena simulation software. After designing the process, the existing bottlenecks leading to the long waiting time of the patients were identified. The waiting time and the number of patients visited were determined as the objective function and the patient flow was improved by presenting improvement scenarios and selecting the best scenario.
 
Results: Simulation results on 66 selected patients in 7 months from October 2020 to May 27, 2021 show that Scenario number 10 has the most improvement in performance criteria but is not applicable in practice. Therefore, due to system limitations, Scenario 2 was selected as the best scenario. Implementing Scenario 2 could reduce the waiting time by 40 percent and increase the number of patients visited by 21 percent.
 
Conclusion: Patient prioritization methods allow patients with higher needs to receive more services than those with lower urgent needs, although they also have longer waiting times for patients with lower urgent needs.