Health Services Research articles from December 2008

Health Services Research archives from December 2008

The underuse of overuse research.(Editorial)
December 1, 2008... Tremendous progress has been made in the development of practical quality of care measures that are now applied in a variety of health care settings. In this issue of HSR, Swaminathan et al. use Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set...

Does competition improve health care quality?(Quality and Efficiency)
December 1, 2008... Reform of the health care system to promote improved quality of care and lower cost growth has been a policy objective for decades. A strategy frequently discussed as a means to achieve these goals is the pursuit of a competitive health care...

The effects of quality improvement for depression in primary care at nine years: results from a randomized, controlled group-level trial.(Quality and Efficiency)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Quality improvement (QI) programs for depression in primary care reduce symptoms and improve functioning among depressed partients (Katon et al. 1995, 1996, 2001, 2004; Katon, Von Korff, and Lin 1999; Hunkeler et al. 2000; Rost et al. 2001,...

Improving health care efficiency and quality using tablet personal computers to collect research-quality, patient-reported data.(Quality and Efficiency)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have increasingly gained acceptance as important and valid measures of symptoms, experiences, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL), and thus as critical metrics for evaluating the value of health care...

Measuring hospital inefficiency: the effects of controlling for quality and patient burden of illness.(Quality and Efficiency)
December 1, 2008... Fueled by rising health care expenditures, greater attention has recently gone toward health care efficiency and its measurement. For stakeholders to evaluate their progress and to make informed choices about quality improvement strategies, the...

Case-mix adjustment of consumer reports about managed behavioral health care and health plans.(Quality and Efficiency)
December 1, 2008... Although effective treatments exist for most mental health disorders, many individuals with mental illness receive inadequate care (McGlynn 2003). This is worrisome because mental illnesses and substance abuse impose substantial burdens on...

Persistence of HMO performance measures.(Quality and Efficiency)(health maintenance organizations)
December 1, 2008... Efforts to measure the performance of health plans on clinical dimensions have expanded rapidly over the past 10-15 years. Clinical performance measures can support plan quality improvement efforts, employer/government insurance contracting,...

Revealing and resolving patient safety defects: the impact of leadership WalkRounds on frontline caregiver assessments of patient safety.(Patient Safety and Medical Errors)(Report)
December 1, 2008... WalkRounds were introduced in 1999 as a program for hospital leadership to sustain good relations with frontline caregivers, promote conversations to identify hazards, and gather information to enhance decision making around patient safety. In...

The impact of medical errors on ninety-day costs and outcomes: an examination of surgical patients.(Patient Safety and Medical Errors)(Report)
December 1, 2008... The Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America was established in 1998 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and its first report estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year due as a result of medical mistakes, with...

The effect of renewal policy changes on SCHIP disenrollment.(Insurance)(State Children's Health Insurance Program)(Report)
December 1, 2008... The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was enacted in 1997 to provide health insurance coverage for uninsured low-income children who do not meet Medicaid eligibility criteria. SCHIP was authorized for l0 years and was up for...

The effectiveness of covering smoking cessation services for Medicare beneficiaries.(Clinical report)
December 1, 2008... Efforts to reduce smoking in the United States have primarily targeted the young before they become habitual smokers. However, there is increasing evidence that quitting smoking, even after decades of exposure, can have a substantial effect on...

Medical malpractice reform and employer-sponsored health insurance premiums.(Insurance)(Report)
December 1, 2008... While the call for federal medical malpractice reforms has cooled with the change in leadership in the Congress (Young 2007), the American Medical Association and nine other physician organizations continue to identify tort reform as a key...

Dosage patterns in methadone treatment: results from a national survey, 1988-2005.(Drug Treatment)(Clinical report)
December 1, 2008... How well do the nation's methadone-maintenance treatment facilities meet established standards for best-practice care? Prior research indicates that methadone treatment providers made marked progress in meeting one key care standard between...

Assessing treatment effects of inhaled corticosteroids on medical expenses and exacerbations among COPD patients: longitudinal analysis of managed care claims.(Drug Treatment)
December 1, 2008... Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by progressive airflow limitation and airway inflammation leading to a gradual loss in lung function (Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease [GOLD] 2006). Acute...

Is neighborhood access to health care provision associated with individual-level utilization and satisfaction?(Access and Utilization)
December 1, 2008... Strong and growing inequalities in health between different social groups (Goesling and Firebaugh 2004; Olsen and Dahl 2007) and between geographical areas (Mackenbach et al. 2003; Rodwin and Neuberg 2005) have been noted in most OECD...

Can additional patient experience items improve the reliability of and add new domains to the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey?(Methods and Research Briefs)
December 1, 2008... Patient perceptions about care received during the hospital stay have been a major focus of hospital management (Bell, Krivich, and Boyd 1997), and interest in patients' perceptions has burgeoned along with implementation of...

Accuracy of physician billing claims for identifying acute respiratory infections in primary care.(Methods and Research Briefs)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Several randomized, placebo-controlled trials of antibiotic use have shown that antibiotics do not provide clinical benefit to children or adults with upper respiratory tract infections (Hoaglund et al. 1950; Cronk et al. 1954; Howie and Clark...

Adverse hospital events for mentally Ill patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery.(Methods and Research Briefs)(Clinical report)
December 1, 2008... An estimated 5.4 percent of American adults have severe mental illness including psychiatric and substance-abuse disorders (Kessler et al. 2002). Mental disorders are associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) (Kawachi et...

Correction to "can additional patient experience items improve the reliability of and add new domains to the CAHPS hospital survey?".(Erratum)(Correction notice)
December 1, 2008... The following grant numbers were omitted from the acknowledgments section of the article "Can Additional Patient Experience Items Improve the Reliability of and Add New Domains to the CAHPS[R] Hospital Survey?" on p. 2220: Data analyses...