Health Services Research articles from April 2006

Health Services Research archives from April 2006

Academy health web casts.(annual research meeting)
April 1, 2006... The Kaiser Family Foundation is providing webcasts from recent Academy-Health-related events. The webcasts are available at http://kaisernetwork.org/ health_cast/hcast_index.cfm * 2006 National Health Policy Conference (NHPC): Select...

AHRQs National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports: resources for health services researchers.(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
April 1, 2006... Some would say that the beginning of wisdom in health services research is the realization that what cannot be measured cannot be changed. Until recently, we lacked a single, accessible source of national longitudinal data on health care...

Increasing the global exchange of evidence-based research.(Editorial Column)
April 1, 2006... Recent headlines about the avian flu pandemic highlight our need for a common understanding of the epidemiology and treatment of diseases and their impact on international systems of care. Diseases that have crossed international borders...

Quality improvement implementation and hospital performance on quality indicators.(Quality of Care)
April 1, 2006... Significant opportunities exist for improving the quality of care delivered in U.S. hospitals. As many as one-fourth of hospital deaths might be preventable; nearly 180,000 people die each year partly as a result of iatrogenic conditions....

Predicting nursing facility residents' quality of life using external indicators.(case study of quality of life)
April 1, 2006... Federal and state officials have considerable interest in determining whether it is possible to develop indicators of the quality of life (QOL) of nursing facility (NF) residents that are more convenient and less expensive than direct,...

Do physicians always flee from HMOs? New results using dynamic panel estimation methods.(Health maintenance organizations)
April 1, 2006... Physicians, like any other professional group, tend to locate in those areas in which they will maximize their incomes, other things equal. Previous studies have found that managed care reduces the earnings of physicians, particularly...

Variation in hospital length of stay: do physicians adapt their length of stay decisions to what is usual in the hospital where they work?(Hospitalization of patients)
April 1, 2006... A persistent finding in health services research is that hospital utilization varies widely (Paul-Shaheen, Clark, and Williams 1987; Ashton et al. 1999; Wennberg 1999). These variations have been observed between geographic areas, hospitals,...

Religious involvement and the use of mental health care.(Religious beliefs influence mental health)
April 1, 2006... Three distinct concepts underlie the notion of religiosity or religious involvement: participation in organized ritual, contact with religious-based social support networks, and spirituality, which refers to the subjective aspects of religious...

Prescription drug expenditures and population demographics.(Research of population demographics )
April 1, 2006... Population demographics play important roles in health system trends and feature prominently in popular rhetoric about health care policy. For example, there is little doubt that the effects of the post-war "baby boom" are being felt in health...

Health insurance and health at age 65: implications for medical care spending on new Medicare beneficiaries.(Medicare offers for elderly)
April 1, 2006... Several recent studies have examined the consequences of uninsurance in a near-elderly population using data from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Survey (Heeringa and Conner 1995). Baker et al. (2001, 2002) found that those who were...

Commentary--sophisticated methods but implausible results: how much does health insurance improve health?(Insurance for medically uninsured persons)
April 1, 2006... Jack Hadley and Timothy Waidmann use data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) to analyze the effect of being uninsured on mortality and morbidity of the near-elderly. Consistent with the findings from other work, they conclude that...

Commentary--response to Richard Kronick.(Insurance to medically uninsured persons)
April 1, 2006... It is encouraging that the debate appears to be shifting from the question of whether having health insurance has any impact on health to the question of the magnitude of its positive effect on health. Moreover, a healthy dose of skepticism to...

The effect of rural hospital closures on community economic health.
April 1, 2006... Hospitals are generally considered to be the locus of rural health care systems. Not only are important health services based at hospitals, but many of a community's health care personnel are either directly employed by or supported by the...

How did welfare reform affect the health insurance coverage of women and children?(Impact of marriage in insurance coverage)
April 1, 2006... Since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, the number of welfare recipients in the U.S. has fallen by 60 percent (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2004). This paper tests...

Disparities in primary care for vulnerable children: The influence of multiple risk factors.(Child uninsured, non-english spoken family, less education of parents are risk factors)
April 1, 2006... Primary care is a cornerstone of the U.S. child health system (Donaldson et al. 1996; Starfield 1998). While many definitions of primary care exist, there is a general consensus on at least four defining features to assess its performance:...

Disparities in the reporting and treatment of health conditions in children: an analysis of the medical expenditure panel survey.(Health conditions of minority chidren)
April 1, 2006... The existence of racial and ethnic disparities in health care has gained increasing recognition in part because of the Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 1999). Recent research suggests significant racial...

Application of regression-discontinuity analysis in pharmaceutical health services research.(Analysis of pretest and posttest design)
April 1, 2006... Health services research often involves evaluation of medical interventions or service programs outside a controlled environment. Such interventions or programs may be the result of public policy or may result from diffusion of newly introduced...

Failure of ICD-9-CM codes to identify patients with comorbid chronic kidney disease in diabetes.(health care outcomes in the united states)(Case study)
April 1, 2006... Comorbid chronic kidney disease (CKD) in patients with diabetes is likely to have profound effects on health care outcomes in the U.S. in the coming decades. The prevalence of diabetes is projected to increase from approximately 16 million...

Should episode-based economic profiles be risk adjusted to account for differences in patients' health risks?(Episode treatment group systems)
April 1, 2006... After the medicare prospective payment system was introduced in the early 1980s, some hospitals--especially teaching institutions--were concerned about inadequate reimbursement for the care they delivered. This concern was prompted by findings...

Patient turnover and nursing staff adequacy.(Research of nurse staffing)
April 1, 2006... National and statewide assessments of hospital nurse staffing frequently utilize a measure that averages counts of the number of nurses or hours of nursing care given the number of patients or patient days of care per hospital (Aiken,...

Correction to "benefit-cost in the California treatment outcome project: does substance abuse treatment 'pay for itself'?".(Erratum)(Correction notice)
April 1, 2006... On p. 196, the last sentence should have read: The main analyses were based on the cohort of clients entering substance abuse treatment between April 1, 2000 and May 31, 2001 who also completed a 9-month follow-up survey (N = 2,567). ...