Health Services Research articles from February 2009

Health Services Research archives from February 2009

Building the path to high-quality care.(Editorial)
February 1, 2009... At this writing, the future shape of U.S. health care is the focus of intense debate. Notwithstanding sharp differences in proposed approaches to guarantee access to high-quality care at an affordable price, an emerging consensus among...

AcademyHealth 25th annual research meeting chair address: from a science of recommendation to a science of implementation.(Chair Address)(Margarila Alegria)(Speech)
February 1, 2009... The founders of AcademyHealth played a decisive role in advancing the health services field. Some, like Dr. Barbara McNeil, accomplished it through education and training of generations of health services researchers. Others, like Dr. Ron...

Modeling efficiency at the process level: an examination of the care planning process in nursing homes.(Nursing Home Care)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Concern about the quality of care in nursing homes is widespread. One response has been to recommend increased staffing, even though this would entail significant costs (Institute of Medicine 1996, 2001). Despite good evidence linking nurse...

Maintaining continuity of care for nursing home residents: effect of states' Medicaid bed-hold policies and reimbursement rates.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, or Nursing Home Reform Act of 1987, mandated that nursing homes adopt a bed-hold policy during acute hospitalization of residents. For a fee, nursing homes reserve the resident's bed during acute...

Effects of state minimum staffing standards on nursing home staffing and quality of care.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)
February 1, 2009... The quality of nursing home care is an important policy issue, especially given the aging of the population. In response to concerns about persistent quality problems in the 1970s, Congress passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) of...

National release of the nursing home quality report cards: implications of statistical methodology for risk adjustment.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... The quality of long-term care received by nursing home (NH) residents remains a persistent concern for consumers, their families and policy makers (Vladeck 1980; Institute of Medicine 1986; Capitman and Bishop 2004). Since the 1987 Nursing Home...

Multilevel analysis of the chronic care model and 5A services for treating tobacco use in urban primary care clinics.(Impacting Treatment Use and Costs)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death and disability in the United States (McGinnis and Foege 1993; Mokdad et al. 2004). Recent studies rank smoking cessation treatment as the most cost-effective preventive service due to...

Assessing the impact of drug use on hospital costs.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Since the mid-1990s, prescription drugs have been the fastest rising component of national health expenditures and are projected to significantly outpace other service sectors for at least another decade to come (Heftier et al. 2005). This...

Transportation brokerage services and Medicaid beneficiaries' access to care.(Environmental Context and Access)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Transportation can be a major access barrier to timely health care for low-income populations. The literature shows two distinct health effects of poor transportation: less use of preventive and primary care, and more use of the emergency...

The effect of community-level unemployment on preventive oral health care utilization.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Oral health is necessary for many functions: eating, nutrition, communication, disease prevention, appearance, and overall health. Marked advances have been made in the quality and level of oral health over the past 50 years. However, the...

Validity of selected AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators based on VA National Surgical Quality Improvement Program data.(Patient Safety)(Agency for Health Care Research and Quality)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Patient safety persists as a national concern since the Institute of Medicine's landmark report on medical errors (Kohn, Corrigan, and Donaldson 2000). The Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently released a methodology, the...

Advancing measurement of patient safety culture.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... The importance of patient safety culture (PSC) measurement in health care is well documented (Pronovost and Sexton 2005; Gaba, Singer, and Rosen 2007; Pace 2007) and measures of PSC are proliferating (Hutchinson et al. 2006). In part, growth in...

Organizational cost of quality improvement for depression care.(Management Interventions)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Research shows major deficits in the quality of care for depression (Kerr et al. 2000; Charbonneau et al. 2003; Liu et al. 2006). Substantial evidence indicates that improved depression care and outcomes can be achieved by implementing...

Effect of evidence-based acute pain management practices on inpatient costs.(Report)
February 1, 2009... In this study we estimate cost changes associated with implementing a "translating research into practice" (TRIP) behavioral intervention designed to increase the use of evidence-based acute pain management practices for hospitalized older...

Translating research into practice intervention improves management of acute pain in older hip fracture patients.(RESEARCH ARTICLE)(Report)
February 1, 2009... Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the conscientious and judicious use of current best evidence, in conjunction with clinical expertise and patient values, to guide health care decisions (Sackett et al. 2000). When EBPs are effectively...

What's the risk? A simple approach for estimating adjusted risk measures from nonlinear models including logistic regression.(Methods)(Report)
February 1, 2009... The health services research literature fails to provide a satisfactory answer to the question: when outcomes are common (i.e., risk > 0.05 in the highest risk category), how does one best quantify the result of a logistic regression (Lee 1981;...

Comparing cost-of-illness estimates from alternative approaches: an application to diabetes.(METHODS ARTICLE)
February 1, 2009... Cost-of-illness (COI) studies are increasingly used to quantify the public health burden associated with a disease, illness, injury, or risk factor (e.g., Gross et al. 1999; American Diabetes Association [ADA] 2003; Fishman et al. 2003;...

Correction to "Advancing Measurement of Patient Safety Culture".(Erratum)(Correction notice)
February 1, 2009... Article originally published in HSR, Volume 44, Number 1, February 2009. On p. 206, the CCHSA was erroneously listed as the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture. It should be listed as the Canadian Council for Health...