Health Services Research articles from August 2008

Health Services Research archives from August 2008

AcademyHealth update.(Calendar)
August 1, 2008... BOARD OF DIRECTOR ELECTIONS September 2-19 The 2008 member election for the AcademyHealth Board of Directors will be held September 2-19. The election will take place online and all votes are confidential. All AcademyHealth individual...

Efforts to expand physician supply deserve scrutiny.(Editorial)
August 1, 2008... U.S. medical schools are in the midst of a significant expansion in their capacity to train new physicians (Cooper, Stoflet, and Wartman 2003), with recent reports from the American Association of Medical Colleges indicating plans that would...

Are family physicians good for you? Endogenous doctor supply and individual health.(Health Care and Outcomes)(Report)
August 1, 2008... Many countries use regulation or financial incentives in an attempt to increase the supply of primary care doctors or family physicians (FP) to areas perceived as underserved. Such policies rest on the premise that increasing the supply of...

Hospital nurse practice environments and outcomes for surgical oncology patients.(Health Care and Outcomes)(Report)
August 1, 2008... NURSE PRACTICE ENVIRONMENTS AND OUTCOMES FOR SURGICAL ONCOLOGY PATIENTS Cancer is the leading cause of death in the nation for adults below the age of 85 years (American Cancer Society 2005). Lung, breast, and colorectal cancers accounted...

Use of VA and Medicare services by dually eligible veterans with psychiatric problems.(Health Care and Outcomes)(Report)
August 1, 2008... Non-VA services may provide an important alternative to veterans affairs (VA) services for VA patients who are eligible for Medicare coverage, especially in areas with poor geographic access to the VA. As Medicare and the VA are legally...

Ownership conversions and nursing home performance.(Structure and Performance)(Report)
August 1, 2008... Quality has been a long standing policy issue in the nursing home sector with over three decades of research establishing substandard care practices in particular facilities (Institute of Medicine 2001). Given that nearly two-thirds of nursing...

Evaluating health care programs by combining cost with quality of life measures: a case study comparing capitation and fee for service.(Structure and Performance)
August 1, 2008... BACKGROUND Many European countries, Australia, and Canada use cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to decide which health technologies to provide (Hutton and Maynard 2000). However, in the United States policy makers do not routinely use CEA...

An empirical taxonomy of hospital governing board roles.(Structure and Performance)
August 1, 2008... Developments, such as Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, concern for medical errors and patient safety, demand for performance by third-party payers, and competition from physician-owned health care...

Publication of Quality Report Cards and Trends in Reported Quality Measures in Nursing Homes.(Quality and Safety)
August 1, 2008... Quality report cards have become a major component of initiatives to enhance the quality of the American health care system. In addition to numerous private and state report cards, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) now...

An overview of patient safety climate in the VA.(Quality and Safety)(Survey)
August 1, 2008... The health care industry attempts to cure patients while avoiding problems and negative outcomes resulting from the processes of care. In many ways, health care strives to be a "high-reliability" enterprise. High-reliability organizations...

The impact of Medicare coverage policies on health care utilization.(Impact of Policy)
August 1, 2008... Medicare finances health care for nearly 40 million elderly and disabled Americans. The Medicare statute authorizes reimbursement only for items or services that are "reasonable and necessary." Medicare administrators have struggled to...

Commentary: the impact of Medicare coverage policies on health care utilization.(Impact of Policy)
August 1, 2008... Traditional fee-for-service Medicare, by far the most popular choice of Medicare beneficiaries, lacks many of the tools that commercial health insurance and Medicare Advantage plans can use to control health care utilization. Prior...

Does reimportation reduce price differences for prescription drugs? Lessons from the European Union.(Impact of Policy)(Report)
August 1, 2008... Cross-national differences in prescription drug prices have been a topic of much discussion in the media and in policy circles (Baker 2004; Bright 2006). Researchers have described some of the underlying causes of these price differences,...

Multimethod evaluation of health policy change: an application to Medicaid managed care in a rural state.(Impact of Policy)
August 1, 2008... In health services research, the problem of how to evaluate the results of policy change has remained challenging (Evaluation Gap Working Group 2006). While the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandates that state governments evaluate...

Effect of eliminating behavioral health benefits for selected Medicaid enrollees.(Impact of Policy)(Report)
August 1, 2008... In response to Medicaid spending that has outpaced state tax revenues, every state in the United States has recently adopted budget-driven Medicaid cost-containment initiatives (Smith et al. 2004). A number of states are responding by...

Racial/ethnic disparities in knowledge about risks and benefits of breast cancer treatment: does it matter where you go?(Disparities)(Report)(Survey)
August 1, 2008... Persistently high rates of mastectomy and wide geographic variation in surgical treatments for early stage breast cancer (National Institutes of Health 1990; Nattinger et al. 2000; Morrow et al. 2001; Wennberg 2002; Baxter et al. 2004) have...

Short- and long-term mortality after an acute illness for elderly whites and blacks.(Disparities)(Report)
August 1, 2008... The 2001 Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment declared definitively that quality of health care is often very different between white and minority populations in the United States (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003). Among hospitalized...

Predicting changes in staff morale and burnout at community health centers participating in the health disparities collaboratives.(Disparities)
August 1, 2008... The introduction of quality improvement (QI) initiatives can present special challenges for health care settings that have limited personnel and financial resources, and high attrition among key staff. In the context of such constraints, the...

Assessing validity of ICD-9-CM and ICD-10 administrative data in recording clinical conditions in a unique dually coded database.(Methods)
August 1, 2008... The World Health Organization adopted the first version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 1900 to internationally monitor and compare mortality statistics and causes of death. Since then, the classification has been...

Use of econometric models to estimate expenditure shares.(Research Brief)(Report)
August 1, 2008... Policy makers and researchers are often interested in understanding the health and financial burden on society from diseases or risk factors. For example, research has focused on quantifying the contribution of obesity, smoking, and other...

Correction to "Crowd-Out in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): incidence, enrollee characteristics and experiences, and potential impact on New York's SCHIP".(Errata)(Correction notice)
August 1, 2008... Laura P. Shone, Paula M. Lantz, Andrew W. Dick, Michael E. Chernew, and Peter G. Szilagyi. Article originally published in HSR Volume 43, Number 3, Part 2, February 2008. In Table 3 of this published article, point estimates in the...

Correction to "Falling Short: Continued Challenges in Meeting the Mental Health Needs of Children with Special Health Care Needs".(Errata)(Correction notice)
August 1, 2008... Anita Chandra and Nicole Lurie. Article originally published in HSR Volume 43, Number 3, June 2008. The June editorial incorrectly cited the Tang et al. article as the Kuhlthau et al. article. The citation appeared correctly in the...