Health Services Research articles from February 2006

Health Services Research archives from February 2006

Academy health update.(Conferences and conventions)
February 1, 2006... National Health Policy Conference February 6-7, 2006--Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel Join AcademyHealth and Health Affairs to hear leading experts from the Administration, academia, Congress, and the health industry share their insights...

Is evidence-based medicine patient-centered and is patient-centered care evidence-based?(Health service researchers still under research)
February 1, 2006... Are achieving evidence-based medicine (EBM) and cultural competence in medicine (CCM) contradictory goals? In some ways, EBM and CCM are complementary means to improve quality; but it can also appear that, by virtue of their methods of changing...

Managed care market share and primary treatment for cancer.
February 1, 2006... Evidence suggests that as the market share of managed care in an area increases, expenditures in Medicare's fee-for-service sector decrease (Baker 1997, 1999; Rodgers and Smith 1999). The ability of managed care to influence spending patterns...

Does wait-list size at registration influence time to surgery? Analysis of a population-based cardiac surgery registry.(Management of hospital waiting lists )
February 1, 2006... In the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), priority wait lists (Nose-worthy, McGurran, and Hadorn 2003) are commonly used to manage access to elective procedures according to urgency of treatment. In particular, patients with coronary...

A needle in a haystack? Uninsured workers in small businesses that do not offer coverage.(Insurance of small business employees)
February 1, 2006... Public discussion of the shortcomings of our employer-based health insurance system often focuses on the low rate at which small businesses offer insurance to their employees. It is well known that most of the uninsured are workers or their...

A measure of trust in insurers.(Managed Care, Insurance and Health Care Delivery)
February 1, 2006... Key Words. Surveys, trust, patient satisfaction Patient or enrollee assessment of health insurance plans is increasingly important for a number of health care constituencies. Consumers need this information to choose wisely between...

How adults' access to outpatient physician services relates to the local supply of primary care physicians in the rural southeast.
February 1, 2006... Numerous studies have shown that an adequate primary care physician supply correlates with a variety of positive population health outcomes including lower mortality rates (Farmer et al. 1991; Shi and Starfield 2001; Shi et al. 2003), earlier...

Disparities in use of and unmet need for therapeutic and supportive services among school-age children with functional limitations: a comparison across settings.(Child Health Services)
February 1, 2006... Disparity in access to and use of medical services has plagued the U.S. health care system for decades. Children with chronic conditions are particularly vulnerable, given their extensive needs for health and related services. Although Medicaid...

The effects of child-only insurance coverage and family coverage on health care access and use: recent findings among low-income children in California.(Child Health Services)
February 1, 2006... In 2001, a peak performance year for California's economy, approximately 36 percent of California's families with children reported incomes near or below poverty (i.e., 200 percent of the federal poverty level [FPL] corresponding to [less than...

Parent-identified barriers to pediatric health care: a process-oriented model.(Child Health Services)
February 1, 2006... Children's health care services access, utilization, and outcomes in the U.S. are characterized by disparities across vulnerability factors such as socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, and language (Newacheck, Hughes, and Stoddard 1996;...

Effect of social security payments on substance abuse in a homeless mentally ill cohort.(Mental Health Services)
February 1, 2006... Possession of a large amount of money is a well-recognized relapse trigger (O'Brien et al. 1990; Wallace 1992), and several highly publicized reports have suggested that Social Security Administration (SSA) benefit payments to patients disabled...

Benefit-cost in the California treatment outcome project: does substance abuse treatment "pay for itself"?(Mental Health Services)
February 1, 2006... In spite of advances in treatment and technology, successfully treating those addicted to alcohol and drugs and helping them maintain abstinence remains a challenge. Traditional health services research on these topics has focused on the...

Impact of institutional review board practice variation on observational health services research.(Analysis of medical care )
February 1, 2006... Ethical oversight of research involving human subjects is essential in order to insure that the values of respect for persons, beneficence, and social justice (United States Department of Health & Human Services 1978) are maintained. That...

Does date stamping ICD-9-CM codes increase the value of clinical information in administrative data?(International classification of diseases)
February 1, 2006... Hospital report cards have become an integral part of the evolving health care landscape. One of the principal barriers to the widespread implementation of health outcomes measurement is the cost of collecting the clinical data required for...

Overcoming bias in estimating the volume-outcome relationship.(Health risk assessment)
February 1, 2006... Twenty-five years ago (Luft, Bunker, and Enthoven 1979), documented an inverse volume-outcome relationship for surgical care. Subsequent studies in this literature (Halm, Lee, and Chassin 2000) have generated similar results. Accordingly,...

The reliability of survey assessments of characteristics of medical clinics.(Payment methods on costs of care)
February 1, 2006... Rising concern about the quality of medical care and preventable medical errors has increased interest in how systems of care operate. Health care organizations can shape the quality of care through the selection of clinical staff or...

Psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the hospital-level consumer assessment of health plans survey[R] instrument.(Planning health care reforms)
February 1, 2006... Like in many advanced countries, current health care reforms which emphasize accountability, transparency, choice, and performance improvement encourage Dutch patients to become critical consumers (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport 2002;...

Clarification note to an algorithm for the use of medicare claims data to identify women with incident breast cancer.(Correction notice)
February 1, 2006... In the description of the algorithm, under the heading Algorithm Development (pp. 1737-1740), the following clearer statements may assist those who wish to implement the algorithm that generated the results presented in the tables of the...