Health Services Research articles from December 2005

Health Services Research archives from December 2005

Academy health update.
December 1, 2005... 2006 National Center for Health Statistics/AcademyHealth Fellowship Call for Application Application Deadline: Monday, January 9, 2006 This program brings visiting scholars in health services research-related disciplines to the...

Racial disparities in care: looking beyond the clinical encounter.(Editorial)
December 1, 2005... In the February issue of this year, Jose Escarce contributed a thoughtful editorial column titled "How Does Race Matter, Anyway?" In it he discussed the many ways in which miscommunication between white physicians and minority patients can...

Out-of-pocket financial burden for low-income families with children: socioeconomic disparities and effects of insurance.
December 1, 2005... Socioeconomic disparities have been documented for children and adults in access to and use of health care, and in health outcomes (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality 2003). Socioeconomic disparities may also exist in the financial...

Practice-level effects of interventions to improve asthma care in primary care settings: the pediatric asthma care patient outcomes research team.(Child Health)
December 1, 2005... Asthma is responsible for substantial morbidity as measured by symptom burden, functional impairment (Fowler, Davenport, and Garg 1992; Maier et al. 1998; Newacheck and Halfon 2000; Annett 2001), and health care utilization (Lozano et al. 1997;...

Access to care and children's primary care experiences: results from a prospective cohort study.
December 1, 2005... High-quality primary care is a cornerstone of efforts to improve health outcomes, control health care spending, and reduce health care disparities (Starfield and Simpson 1993; Starfield 1996, 1998; Starfield and Shi 2004). Primary care has been...

Improved estimates of the benefits of breastfeeding using sibling comparisons to reduce selection bias.
December 1, 2005... Despite an enormous literature demonstrating better health and cognitive outcomes among breastfed children, the effects of breastfeeding are uncertain. This is because the vast majority of studies share a common weakness: they are...

Patient and provider assessments of adherence and the sources of disparities: evidence from diabetes care.
December 1, 2005... Inequalities in health care can be attributed to a wide range of sources, including differences in access to care, the source of care, insurance coverage, education, and socioeconomic status. However, many studies find that significant...

Assessing quality of diabetes care by measuring longitudinal changes in hemoglobin A1c in the Veterans Health Administration.
December 1, 2005... Improving the quality of health care is a fundamental concern in the Institute of Medicine's landmark 2001 report Crossing the Quality Chasm (Committee on Quality Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine 2001). Central to this are measures...

Developing a quality measure for clinical inertia in diabetes care.
December 1, 2005... Central to improving clinical practice is reliable and valid measures of the quality of care. While process and outcome measures each play an important role in quality measurement, it has long been recognized that the development of process...

Commentary--improving diabetes care by combating clinical inertia.
December 1, 2005... Over the last 10 years, numerous clinical trials have provided consistent and strong evidence that adequate control of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), blood pressure (BP), and LDL-cholesterol (LDL) levels significantly reduces major macrovascular...

Does the impact of managed care on substance abuse treatment services vary by provider profit status?(Organizations and Care)
December 1, 2005... This paper extends our previous research by determining whether, and how, the impact of managed care (MC) on service offerings varies by the profit status of the substance abuse treatment (SAT) facility (Olmstead, White, and Sindelar 2004). It...

What happens when hospital-based skilled nursing facilities close? A propensity score analysis.
December 1, 2005... In recent decades, postacute care services, which include skilled nursing facility (SNF) care, inpatient rehabilitation, and home health care, have emerged as an important component of the Medicare program and the U.S. health care system as a...

Delayed care and unmet needs among health care system users: when does fiduciary trust in a physician matter?
December 1, 2005... Unmet health care needs and delays in needed care are widespread problems in the United States. The Institute of Medicine (2002, p. 227) asserts that "much of the population fails to receive recommended preventive services, and many patients do...

Development and testing of a short form of the patient activation measure.
December 1, 2005... A previous publication described the development and testing of the Patient Activation Measure (PAM), which assesses patient self-reported knowledge, skill, and confidence for self-management of one's health or chronic condition (Hibbard et al....

The geographic distribution of physicians revisited.
December 1, 2005... While views on the adequacy of the national physician workforce vary widely and fluctuate over time (Council on Graduate Medical Education [COGME] 1998; Cooper et al. 2002; Grumbach 2002a, b; Weiner 2002; Blumenthal 2004) most seem to agree...

An episode-based framework for analyzing health care expenditures: an application of reward renewal models.
December 1, 2005... Many questions in health services research revolve around the issue of timing. This issue arises in research on treatment onset or termination as well as transitions between treatment settings. Measures of treatment timing are frequently used...

Development and evaluation of the CAHPS[R] hospital survey.
December 1, 2005... This special issue of Health Services Research is intended to provide the reader with technical documentation of the development and testing of the CAHPS Hospital Survey and on the decisions that shaped the final product. In addition, it gives...

Measuring hospital care from the patients' perspective: an overview of the CAHPS[R] hospital survey development process.
December 1, 2005... The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is engaged in a nationwide initiative to make comparative performance information on hospitals available to the public. Such information can help consumers make more informed choices when...

Review of the literature on survey instruments used to collect data on hospital patients' perceptions of care.
December 1, 2005... Patient evaluations of hospital care can be useful to payers, regulatory bodies, accrediting agencies, hospitals, and consumers. All of these parties can use this information to gauge quality of hospital care from the patients' perspective...

What do consumers want to know about the quality of care in hospitals?
December 1, 2005... The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is engaged in several initiatives to publicly report measures of health care provider performance. As early as 1999, CMS began publicly reporting CAHPS[R] patient experience survey and Health...

Role of cognitive testing in the development of the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey.
December 1, 2005... Cognitively testing survey questions has become the accepted first step in the development of a survey instrument. Prior to 1984, survey questions were evaluated using loosely structured respondent debriefings (i.e., asking the respondents...

Methods used to streamline the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey.
December 1, 2005... There currently exists no universally accepted method of determining and reporting patient assessments of hospital care (Caste et al. 2005). The CAHPS[R] hospital survey was designed to provide consumers with comparative information about...

Exploratory factor analyses of the CAHPS[R] Hospital pilot survey responses across and within medical, Surgical, and obstetric services.(consumer assessments of healthcare providers and systems)
December 1, 2005... The Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS[R]) Hospital survey was designed to enable patients, physicians, and payers to compare quality among hospitals and to facilitate quality improvement in hospitals. Efficient...

Patterns of unit and item nonresponse in the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey.
December 1, 2005... The CAHPS[R] hospital project is an effort jointly sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to collect data that objectively measure patients' perceptions of hospital care...

Equivalence of mail and telephone responses to the CAHPS[R] hospital survey.(consumer assessment of health providers and systems)
December 1, 2005... The Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CAHPS[R]) Hospital Survey assesses patients' experiences with care in the hospital. The survey was designed to be administered by mail or telephone to allow flexibility of administration...

Assessment of the equivalence of the Spanish and English versions of the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey on the quality of inpatient care.
December 1, 2005... The United States is an increasingly diverse country where 45 million people, representing 18 percent of the population, speak a language other than English at home. Among the more than 35 million Hispanics/Latinos who represent the largest...

Case-mix adjustment of the CAHPS[R] Hospital survey.(Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems)
December 1, 2005... The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS[R]) Hospital project is an extension of the CAHPS project, in which the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) funded a consortium of investigators to develop patient...