Health Services Research articles from August 2005

Health Services Research archives from August 2005

AcademyHealth update.(Health care reform news)
August 1, 2005... Two Commonwealth Fund Programs Make Their Home at Academy Health The Commonwealth Fund has placed two programs at AcademyHealth: The Commission on a High Performance Health Care System and The Program on Medicare's Future. The Commission on...

The persistent challenge of avoidable hospitalizations.(ambulatory care management)
August 1, 2005... In the late 1980s John Billings developed the concept of counting potentially avoidable--or ambulatory care sensitive--hospitalizations as an indirect reflection of problems with access to care and effective primary care. (Billings and Teicholz...

Patients' preferences for technical versus interpersonal quality when selecting a primary care physician.(Quality of Care)
August 1, 2005... The release of performance data about health care providers to the public as a means of improving quality of care has been advocated by government agencies such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), nonprofit accreditation...

Assessing the implementation of the chronic care model in quality improvement collaboratives.
August 1, 2005... The Institute of Medicine's report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (IOM 2001), has challenged health care practitioners, administrators, and policymakers to implement major reforms to reinvent the nation's...

An educational intervention to enhance nurse leaders' perceptions of patient safety culture.(Quality of Care)
August 1, 2005... Patient safety and medical error have emerged as important quality and public policy issues in health care. Studies of the incidence of adverse events (AEs) in acute care hospitals have been reported internationally (e.g., Brennan et al. 1991;...

Increasing health insurance costs and the decline in insurance coverage.(Competition, Markets, and Insurance)
August 1, 2005... The 1990s were a decade of relative prosperity, yet the percentage of Americans without health insurance coverage rose over 17 percent between 1990 and 1998. This decline generally reflects a drop in the rates of employer-sponsored coverage, a...

Nursing home spending patterns in the 1990s: the role of nursing home competition and excess demand.(Competition, Markets, and Insurance)
August 1, 2005... Nursing homes provide a complex array of services to a heterogeneous group of patients. They offer both clinical care and a living environment that serves as the residents' home. Nursing homes allocate their revenue-constrained resources...

The effects of price competition and reduced subsidies for uncompensated care on hospital mortality.(Competition, Markets, and Insurance)
August 1, 2005... Market-based reforms have been implemented throughout the United States in the past decade to slow recent increases in health care costs, but little is known about how these reforms have affected the quality of care (Gaynor and Haas-Wilson...

The impact of an innovative reform to the South Carolina Dental Medicaid system.(Competition, Markets, and Insurance)
August 1, 2005... The Medicaid program was established in 1965 (Mitchell 1991), and amendments to the Medicaid program instituted in 1968 required all states to include dental care for individuals under 21 years of age as part of the Early and Periodic...

The effect of expanded mental health benefits on treatment initiation and specialist utilization.(Employee assistance programs research reports)
August 1, 2005... Mental health disorders represent one of the most common problems facing adults in the labor force. It is estimated that within a 12-month-period nearly 30 percent of the U.S. population experiences some diagnosable mental health or addictive...

Neighborhood effects on posthospitalization mortality: a population-based cohort study of the elderly in Chicago.(Correlates of Ambulatory Care)
August 1, 2005... Geographic variation in health status, at levels ranging from states to counties to neighborhoods, is well documented (LaVeist 1989, 1992, 1995; Collins and David 1990, 1992; Clarke, Farmer, and Miller 1994; Chang and Christakis 2005). One...

Dynamic effects among patients' treatment needs, beliefs, and utilization: a prospective study of adolescents in drug treatment.
August 1, 2005... Adolescent substance abuse appears to contribute to a variety of harms both for society and for youths themselves. It is associated with reductions in wages and economic productivity (Bryant, Samaranayake, and Wilhite 1993; Burgess and Propper...

More may be better: evidence of a negative relationship between physician supply and hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive conditions.(Correlates of Ambulatory Care)
August 1, 2005... Hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSH), also called potentially preventable hospitalization, is a commonly used indicator of the accessibility and overall effectiveness of primary health care (Weissman, Gatsonis, and...

Physician visits, hospitalizations, and socioeconomic status: ambulatory care sensitive conditions in a Canadian setting.(Correlates of Ambulatory Care)
August 1, 2005... Recent cost containment efforts have increased the need to identify where resources might be most efficiently targeted and to monitor the effects of such interventions. At the same time, the economic and health benefits of appropriate primary...

New York's statistical model accurately predicts mortality risk for veterans who obtain private sector CABG.(Methods)
August 1, 2005... Since its reorganization in 1996, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has adopted an aggressive quality improvement strategy (Kizer 1996) and has achieved dramatic improvements on many performance measures (Jha et al. 2003). Although the...

The quality of the quality indicator of pain derived from the minimum data set.(Methods)
August 1, 2005... Quality indicators (QIs) are developed by government and researchers to measure and monitor the performance of health care providers (Starfield 1998). To be considered useful for monitoring providers' quality of care, a QI must be clinically...

A matter of classes: stratifying health care populations to produce better estimates of inpatient costs.(modelling)
August 1, 2005... Traditional models of health care utilization, such as ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models and the two-part model, restrict the effect of predictive covariates to be equal for all patients in the data. This may be unrealistic as the...

Predicting mortality and healthcare utilization with a single question.(Methods)
August 1, 2005... Health administrators, researchers, and policymakers use prediction models to forecast patient outcomes including morbidity, mortality, and health system utilization. Traditionally, administratively derived predictors have been used for such...

Institutional variability in a minimal risk, population-based study: recognizing policy barriers to health services research.(Methods)
August 1, 2005... Federal rules and regulations exist to ensure the protection of human subjects involved in research (Belmont Report 1979; Tire 45, Code of Federal Regulations, part 46 2001); but it is the institutional review board (IRB) that interprets,...