Reducing the peak time of an epidemic disease in order for slowing down the eventual dynamics and getting prepared for the unavoidable epidemic wave is utmost significant to fight against the risks of a contagious epidemic disease. To serve to this purpose, the well-documented infection model of SIR is examined in the current research to propose an analytical approach for providing an explicit formula associated with a straightforward computation of peak time of outbreak. Initially, the time scale from the relevant autonomous SIR epidemic model is formulated analytically via an integral based on the fractions of susceptible and infected compartments. Afterwards, through a series expansion of the logarithmic term of the resultant integrand, the peak time is shown to rely upon the fraction of susceptible, the infectious ratio as well as the initial fractions of ill and susceptible individuals. The approximate expression is shown to rigorously capable of capturing the time threshold of illness for an epidemic from the semi-time SIR epidemiology. Otherwise, it is also successful to predict the peak time from a past history of a disease when all-time epidemic model is adopted. Accuracy of the derived expressions are initially confirmed by direct comparisons with recently reported approximate formulas in the literature. Several other epidemic disease samples including the COVID-19 often studied in the recent literature are eventually attacked with favourable performance of the presented formulae for assessing the peak time occurrence of an epidemic. A quick evaluation of the peak time of a disease certainly enables the governments to take early effective epidemic precautions.More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying the association with five different democracy measures, this study shows that while the infection rates of the disease do indeed appear to be higher for more democratic countries so far, their observed case fatality rates are lower. There is also a negative association between case fatality rates and government attempts to censor media. However, such censorship relates positively to the infection rate.Due to the recent advancements in wearables and sensing technology, health scientists are increasingly developing mobile health (mHealth) interventions. In mHealth interventions, mobile devices are used to deliver treatment to individuals as they go about their daily lives. These treatments are generally designed to impact a near time, proximal outcome such as stress or physical activity. The mHealth intervention policies, often called just-in-time adaptive interventions, are decision rules that map a individual's current state (e.g., individual's past behaviors as well as current observations of time, location, social activity, stress and urges to smoke) to a particular treatment at each of many time points. The vast majority of current mHealth interventions deploy expert-derived policies. In this paper, we provide an approach for conducting inference about the performance of one or more such policies using historical data collected under a possibly different policy. Our measure of performance is the average of proximal outcomes over a long time period should the particular mHealth policy be followed. We provide an estimator as well as confidence intervals. This work is motivated by HeartSteps, an mHealth physical activity intervention.The current COVID-19 pandemic has reinstated the importance of telehealth as a business model for accelerating the accessibility of healthcare and improving the quality of healthcare for citizens of a country. Telehealth service has a tremendous potential in a developing country like India where the healthcare facilities in India are heavily concentrated in urban cities while their majority (67%) of the population resides in rural areas. At the same time, a high teledensity of almost 90% supports telehealth overall reach. However, the growth of telehealth in India till now has been sluggish but the corona virus (COVID-19) crisis has redefined the telehealth ecosystem by reducing the risk of infection through person-to-person contact. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/CP-690550.html In this study, we explore the perception of healthcare users towards telehealth services and analyze the key enablers for the telehealth services in the current scenario. We collected data from 1170 participants through personal interview. The results of the study shows a considerable segment of the population is having high healthcare need, have aspirations for accessing better healthcare for themselves and their family members and use ICT to a significant extent. At the same time, they have positive attitude towards telehealth and socio-demographic factors like age, geographical location, educational qualification, family size affects the attitude towards telehealth services. The results of the study shows there is a significant market for telehealth services in India to be explored by the technology firms, hospitals and other healthcare stakeholders and going forward it has an enormous capability to transform the complete healthcare ecosystem, especially in developing countries like India post the COVID-19 crisis.Business models have historically facilitated the ability of firms to create and capture value. Focusing on financial service agents (FSAs) as actors in the Nigerian financial services industry, this study helps to elucidate how value creation and distribution can facilitate business model innovation (BMI) in an emerging market. We deployed Osterwalder and Pigneur's business model canvas alongside Amit and Zott's Sources of Value in e-Business (SVCeB) model in mapping FSA business models and value creation sources. We find that the constant need to align the resources of a firm with the demand conditions at the customer end triggers the need for BMI by FSAs. The findings also demonstrate that FSAs have weak business models that inhibit their sustainability and ultimately impede their ability to play their role in closing the country's financial exclusion gap. We suggest the need for business model innovation by FSAs as a pathway to viability, profitability and sustainability.