Health Services Research articles from April 2005

Health Services Research archives from April 2005

Are quality improvement messages registering?(Editorial Column)
April 1, 2005... More often than not, commentaries highlight the findings of studies with important new positive findings. Instead, we highlight three papers that we believe are important and have largely negative or null findings. We are all familiar with...

The John Eisenberg lecture: health services research as a citizen in improvement.
April 1, 2005... Arguably the greatest achievement of academic health services research of the last half-century has created its greatest unmet challenge. The achievement is to have documented beyond doubt the widespread defects in health care, even in wealthy...

Health policy roundtable--view from the state legislature: translating research into policy.(Policy Reports)
April 1, 2005... Chair: Rep. Merwyn R. (Mitch) Greenlick, Ph.D., is a Democratic representative in the Oregon House of Representatives. He spent 30 years as Director of Research for Kaiser Permanente and 10 years as Chair of the Department of Public Health and...

Health policy roundtable--policy by numbers: the role of budget estimates and scoring in health care reform.
April 1, 2005... Chair: Sherry Glied, Ph.D., is a professor and chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Panelists: Linda Bilheimer, Ph.D., is a senior program officer at The Robert...

The association between health insurance coverage and diabetes care; data from the 2000 behavioral risk factor surveillance system.(Impact of Health Insurance)(Author Abstract)
April 1, 2005... The underuse of recommended preventive practices is common among individuals with diabetes and may be responsible for less-than-optimal health outcomes (Harris 2000). Diabetes is the number one cause of blindness in the working-age population...

Medicare expenditures for residents in assisted living: data from a National Study.
April 1, 2005... When one peruses Medicare expenditure data, one of the clearest distinctions between recipients is between those beneficiaries living in the community and those living in skilled or long-term care facilities. In 1996, Medicare per capita claims...

Does continuity of care matter in a universally insured population?(Author Abstract)
April 1, 2005... Continuity of care, which is often defined as a long-term relationship between a patient and a physician, regardless of the presence of any specific disease (Starfield 1980; Haggerty et al. 2003), has long been thought to be an essential aspect...

Health benefits offer rates: is there a nonresponse bias?
April 1, 2005... Over 44 million Americans are without health insurance, leaving the U.S. alone among the industrialized nations of the world in which a substantial share of its population is without health coverage. About 80 percent of the uninsured are...

How much is postacute care use affected by its availability?(Impact of Levels of Service)(Author Abstract)
April 1, 2005... Postacute care (PAC) was the fastest growing sector of the Medicare program throughout the early to mid-1990s. A number of factors including payment incentives, advances in drug treatments and surgical techniques, and improvements in outpatient...

Mortality benefit of transfer to level I versus level II trauma centers for head-injured patients.
April 1, 2005... Although regional and statewide trauma systems have become more common in the last decade (MacKenzie et al. 2003) several level I trauma centers have recently closed, and approximately 19 have been threatened throughout the country (Trauma...

From adversary to partner: have quality improvement organizations made the transition?(Impact of System Interventions)(Author Abstract)
April 1, 2005... Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs), formerly called Peer Review Organizations (PROs), are the primary means by which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) promote quality of care for Medicare's 40 million beneficiaries....

Can computer-generated evidence-based care suggestions enhance evidence-based management of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? A randomized, controlled trial.
April 1, 2005... In 2001, the Institute of Medicine documented the gap between recommended and actual practice of medicine in the United States (Institute of Medicine 2001). Many proven interventions were not routinely being used. Reactive airways diseases,...

Critical pathway effectiveness: assessing the impact of patient, hospital care, and pathway characteristics using qualitative comparative analysis.(Author Abstract)
April 1, 2005... Critical pathways are being implemented in many U.S. hospitals, primarily to improve the efficiency of hospital care while maintaining or improving quality (Pearson et al. 2001). Critical pathways are structured multidisciplinary care plans...

The causes of racial and ethnic differences in influenza vaccination rates among elderly medicare beneficiaries.(Racial Disparities)
April 1, 2005... Influenza outbreaks occur nearly every year and cause significant excess medical costs (McBean, Babish, and Warren 1993), as well as an average of 36,000 excess deaths, mostly among the elderly (Bridges et al. 2003). Influenza vaccination has...

Commentary--anatomy of racial disparity in influenza vaccination.
April 1, 2005... The Institute of Medicine report, Unequal Treatment, documents the presence of racial/ethnic disparities in health care across multiple procedures. It concluded that stereotyping, biases, and uncertainty on the part of health care providers all...

Racial and ethnic disparities and perceptions of health care: does health plan type matter?
April 1, 2005... Racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care are well documented (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2002). Yet, a full understanding of the causal mechanisms of these disparities remains elusive. Three threads of work stimulated this paper....

A comparison of clinically important differences in health-related quality of life for patients with chronic lung disease, asthma, or heart disease.(Methods)
April 1, 2005... The incorporation of patient-reported health-related quality of life (HRQL) measures to better assess clinical outcomes has been an important goal of evidence-based medicine (Guyatt et al. 1997). The Medical Outcomes Study Short-Form 36-Item...

Commentary--goodbye M(C)ID! Hello MID, where do you come from?(Maintenance Instruction Document )(Health-related quality of life )
April 1, 2005... Health-related quality of life (HRQL) has overcome many barriers that limited its acceptance as an important outcome in health care. One of the remaining barriers relates to how one should interpret HRQL scores when they change over time within...