Health Services Research articles from August 2006

Health Services Research archives from August 2006

The influence of health policy and market factors on the hospital safety net.(Balanced Budget Act)
August 1, 2006... Hospitals in the U.S. have traditionally provided substantial amounts of charity and discounted care to indigent patients (Melnick, Mann, and Bamezai 2000; Hadley and Holahan 2003). Several policy and market changes during the late 1990s,...

The impact of health plan delivery system organization on clinical quality and patient satisfaction.(recent examinations of multispecialty group practices )(Case study)
August 1, 2006... Evidence of the quality gap between best practice and the current reality of everyday medical care is widely documented and acknowledged (Institute of Medicine [IOM] 2001a, b, 2002; Leatherman and McCarthy 2002; McGlynn et al. 2003). Two IOM...

Effects of compensation methods and physician group structure on physicians' perceived incentives to alter services to patients.(traditional fee-for-service)(independent practice associations)
August 1, 2006... Attempts by managed care plans during the 1990s to alter productivity incentives inherent in traditional fee-for-service (FFS) arrangements with others favoring more efficient treatment styles focused attention on the use of financial...

Are physician reimbursement strategies associated with processes of care and patient satisfaction for patients with diabetes in managed care?(financial incentives in health care industry)
August 1, 2006... Although controversial, the use of financial incentives in health care has garnered increasing interest (Berwick 1995; Miller and Sage 1999; Bailit Health Purchasing LLC and Sixth Man Consulting Inc. 2001; Institute of Medicine 2001; Rolnick...

Drug treatment service utilization and outcomes for Hispanic and white methamphetamine abusers.(Navigating Health Care Systems)
August 1, 2006... Ethnic disparities in the availability and quality of substance abuse treatment are of interest to both policy makers and treatment service providers. While there have been a number of studies indicating greater unmet needs for health services...

Rural residents with disabilities confront substantial barriers to obtaining primary care.(low rates of employment-related health insurance)
August 1, 2006... Rural residents often confront significant barriers when seeking health care, including limited numbers of primary care and specialist physicians nearby, the absence of sophisticated inpatient and diagnostic services, lack of public...

Referrals to high-quality cardiac surgeons: patients' race and characteristics of their physicians.(low utilization rates of coronary artery bypass graft )(Case study)
August 1, 2006... Although much of the evidence regarding racial disparities in cardiac surgery care focuses on lack of access to services, that is, low utilization rates of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures by minorities (Canto et al. 2000; Epstein...

State regulation and the delivery of physical therapy services.(Navigating Health Care Systems)(Case study)
August 1, 2006... There is a growing trend in health care to supplement or substitute cheaper support personnel for more highly skilled providers (Buchan and Dal Poz 2002). Use of support personnel can relieve more highly skilled and costly professionals from...

The effect of state Medicaid case-mix payment on nursing home resident acuity.(Effects of Payment Strategies)
August 1, 2006... A number of studies have observed that access to nursing home care for Medicaid recipients is delayed relative to private-paying individuals (Feder and Scanlon 1980; Shapiro, Roos, and Kavanagh 1980; Friedman 1982; Greenless, Marshall, and Yett...

Erratum for "The Effect of State Medicaid Case-Mix Payment on Nursing Home Resident Acuity".(Effects of Payments Strategies)(Correction notice)
August 1, 2006... In the article published in this issue of HSR (Vol. 41, No. 4: pp. 1317-36), entitled "The Effect of State Medicaid Case-Mix Payment on Nursing Home Resident Acuity" by Zhanlian Feng, David C. Grabowski, Orna Intrator, and Vincent Mor, the...

Changes in the use of postacute care during the initial Medicare payment reforms.(Balanced Budget Act of 1997)
August 1, 2006... Medicare postacute care (PAC) services provide recuperative or rehabilitative services to patients discharged from acute-care hospitals. As hospital length of stays shortened considerably after the hospital prospective payment system...

A cost analysis of the Iowa Medicaid primary care case management program.(hospital and emergency room services)(Health Care Finance Administration)
August 1, 2006... Caught between rising costs and limited budgets, state Medicaid programs have been turning to managed care (Freund and Hurley 1995; Cagey 2000). A central feature of managed care plans is their use of mechanisms to reduce expenditures. Examples...

Stage of change for making an informed decision about Medicare health plans.(Balanced Budget Act)(Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)(Medicare program)(Case study)
August 1, 2006... The Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 authorized a number of new health plan options under the Medicare+Choice program, providing the nation's Medicare beneficiaries with a range of choices that could potentially offer more benefits at a lower...

Development of an easy-to-use Spanish health literacy test.(Informing Decision Makers)
August 1, 2006... Health literacy means "the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions" (Selden et al. 2000). The past several years have...

Accuracy of hospital report cards based on administrative data.(Informing Decision Makers)
August 1, 2006... Improving the quality of health care has become the centerpiece of health care reform in this country. According to the landmark report from the Institute of Medicine, "between the health care we have and the care we could have lies not just a...

Date stamping: will it withstand the test of time?(hospital quality)
August 1, 2006... The past two decades have seen an explosion of work on measuring and reporting health care quality as a means to ensure accountability and to stimulate quality improvement. In the Unites States, hospital quality has been a central focus of this...

Health care organizations' use of data on race/ethnicity to address disparities in health care.
August 1, 2006... Publication of the Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003) represented a key transition point in the field of disparities research. Up to that point, the vast majority of studies had been descriptive in...

Addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health care: using federal data to support local programs to eliminate disparities.(Special Section Race and Ethnicity)
August 1, 2006... Racial and ethnic disparities in both the use of health care services and the quality of care within the United States have been well documented (Gornick et al. 1996; Institute of Medicine 2002; Virnig et al. 2002; Weech-Maldonado et al. 2003;...

Using a Spanish surname match to improve identification of Hispanic women in Medicare administrative data.(Generally Useful Ethnic Search System)
August 1, 2006... As the largest health provider in the United States, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) maintains Medicare administrative/claims data that have been used extensively by researchers and federal/state governments for assessing...

Use of geocoding and surname analysis to estimate race and ethnicity.(Special Section Race and Ethnicity)
August 1, 2006... Eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care will require health care plans, hospitals, and other health care organizations to obtain race and ethnicity on their plan members or patients (Institute of Medicine 2002; National Quality...

Obtaining data on patient race, ethnicity, and primary language in health care organizations: current challenges and proposed solutions.(Special Section Race and Ethnicity)
August 1, 2006... Numerous studies document that racial and ethnic minorities often receive lower quality care than nonminorities. Although aggregate national data are important, sample sizes often limit their usefulness to only broad racial and ethnic groups....

Looking forward: cross-cutting issues in the collection and use of racial/ethnic data.(Special Section Race and Ethnicity)
August 1, 2006... Numerous authors have advanced the premise that addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health care is best done by treating disparities in care as a health care quality issue. Like any other quality improvement undertaking, successfully...

Foreword to: keeping our promises: research, practice, and policy issues in health care reliability. A special issue of health services research *.(Editorial Column)
August 1, 2006... When Paul O'Neill became CEO of Alcoa, he declared a bold new aim: Alcoa would become the world's safest place to work. A few days later, a young Alcoa employee was killed in an industrial accident in Arizona. O'Neill immediately brought the...

Organizational silence and hidden threats to patient safety.(Public Policy and Research Agenda)
August 1, 2006... Some 30 years ago an article appeared in the organizational management literature where the author described a 106-mile family trip in an unairconditioned Buick taken one very hot Sunday afternoon across a godforsaken desert to eat an...

Sensemaking of patient safety risks and hazards.(Public Policy and Research Agenda)
August 1, 2006... As noted in a 2000 patient safety report from the Department of Health in the United Kingdom--An Organization with a Memory: Report of an Expert Group on Learning from Adverse Events in the NHS (Department of Health, United Kingdom [DOH/UK]...

Teamwork as an essential component of high-reliability organizations.(Public Policy and Research Agenda)
August 1, 2006... A healthy 38-year-old woman was admitted to a major medical center to deliver her first child. Although she was a low-risk patient with only mildly elevated blood pressure, her admission ended tragically when she underwent an emergency cesarean...

Creating high reliability in health care organizations.(Public Policy and Research Agenda)(implementing patient-safety interventions)
August 1, 2006... In the years 1999 and 2001, landmark reports from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) made deficiencies in quality of care and patient safety inescapably visible to health care professionals and the public (Institute of Medicine 1999, 2001). What...

Struggling to invent high-reliability organizations in health care settings: insights from the field.(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
August 1, 2006... The primary mission of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has been to support and conduct health services research and to disseminate those research findings) Recently the Agency has changed its mission to: "Improving the...

Enhancing patient safety through organizational learning: are patient safety indicators a step in the right direction?(Patterns, Culture, and Reliability)
August 1, 2006... Heightened attention is being paid to the quality and safety of medical care. This attention brings with it an increased demand for data on the quality and safety performance of the individuals and organizations that provide health care (Kohn,...

Improving patient safety in hospitals: contributions of high-reliability theory and normal accident theory.(high-reliability organizations )
August 1, 2006... The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report To Err Is Human introduced many patient safety advocates to the idea of developing hospitals into high-reliability organizations (HROs) (Kohn, Corrigan, and Donaldson 2000). The HRO model is appealing, in...

Making noncatastrophic health care processes reliable: learning to walk before running in creating high-reliability organizations.(Practical Applications of Realiability Theory)
August 1, 2006... Current pay for performance and public reporting of clinical process measures have drawn attention to the generally poor process performance health care achieves in the application of clinical evidence. Recent studies show widespread...

Fair and just culture, team behavior, and leadership engagement: the tools to achieve high reliability.(Practical Applications of Reliability Theory)
August 1, 2006... In health care we excel in defining projects and tackling them with zeal, yet the end result, particularly in the safety-based ones, is that most do not achieve the desired outcomes. Instead, projects suffer from inadequate design, and we...

Commentary--achieving a high-performance health system: high reliability organizations within a broader agenda.
August 1, 2006... STRIVING FOR A HIGH-PERFORMANCE HEALTH SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES Despite a tradition of innovation and a "can-do" attitude among Americans, the performance of our health care system falls considerably short of where it could be. The...