Health Services Research articles from October 2002

Health Services Research archives from October 2002

Academy Health update.(health care industry happenings from the newly named AcademyHealth)
October 1, 2002... The Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy has shortened its name to AcademyHealth (www.academyhealth.org) and adopted a new tagline, "Advancing Research, Policy and Practice," to better reflect its mission. A professional home...

Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. (Ahrq Update).
October 1, 2002... A sample of recent headlines reveals that disparities in U.S. health care persist: Health Improves but Racial Disparities Remain (Associated Press in the New York Times, January 25, 2002a) For Tribes, Traditions May Be Key to a...

Addressing health disparities: where should we start? (Editorial Column).
October 1, 2002... It has long been recognized that the health status of minority populations is poorer than that of whites. The recent Institute of Medicine report titled Unequal Treatment has compiled a convincing body of evidence that among similarly insured...

Quality of Cardiac Surgeons and managed care contracting practices. (Quality).
October 1, 2002... Managed care organizations (MCOs), with more than 150 million enrollees (Dranove, Simon, and White 1998), have become the dominant type of health delivery system in the United States. The service delivery practices they adopt define the quality...

The effects of primary care depression treatment on patients' clinical status and employment.
October 1, 2002... This study examines the effects of evidence-based depression treatment, delivered under naturalistic primary care practice conditions, on health and employment outcomes at six months. Depressive disorders are highly prevalent in the general...

Whom should we profile? Examining diabetes care practice variation among primary care providers, provider groups, and health care facilities.
October 1, 2002... While appropriately placed accountability may be good for quality improvement, to date the effect of profiling on changing the practice patterns of individual providers has been mixed (Balas et al. 1996; Mainous et al. 2000; Weiss and Wagner...

Relationship between regulatory status, quality of care, and three-year mortality in canadian residential care facilities: a longitudinal study.
October 1, 2002... As the population ages, growing numbers of older adults require long-term care to overcome their disabilities and impairments. The vast majority of these individuals would prefer to remain in the community with the help of their family and...

Plan characteristics and SSI enrollees' access to and quality of care in four TennCare MCOs. (Access).(Supplemental Security Income)
October 1, 2002... Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients are enrolling in Medicaid managed care; their needs are extensive, diverse, and complex; and those needs may challenge managed care organizations (MCOs). In 1998, a quarter of nonelderly Medicaid...

Expanding the Andersen model: the role of psychosocial factors in long-term care use.
October 1, 2002... Use of long-term care services among minority elders is an important topic of research in light of the changing age and ethnic composition of the U.S. population. By 2030, the number of persons older than age 65 in the U.S. is projected to...

Quantifying components of drug expenditure inflation: the British Columbia seniors' drug benefit plan. (Costs).
October 1, 2002... After adjusting for general inflation, per capita drug costs more than doubled in North America between 1985 and 1999 (Health Care Financing Administration 2000; Canadian Institute for Health Information 2001; Organization for Economic...

Competition among hospitals for HMO business: effect of price and nonprice attributes.
October 1, 2002... Policymakers and health care analysts have been keenly interested in the role of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in stimulating price competition among hospitals. The HMOs are thought to fulfill this role in large part by referring...

The cost of doing business: cost structure of electronic immunization registries.
October 1, 2002... Success in immunizing the pediatric population has progressed to the point that disease burden is essentially zero for many of the childhood vaccine preventable diseases; however, reaching this level has required substantial resources in the...

Breast cancer and women's labor supply. (Other).
October 1, 2002... The National Cancer Institute's Office of Cancer Survivorship has as one of its objectives "to develop an agenda for the continuous acquisition of knowledge concerning the problems facing cancer survivors, including the medical, psychological,...

Using a Standardized Donor Ratio to assess the performance of Organ procurement organizations. (Methods).
October 1, 2002... Organ transplantation is one of the greatest modem medical achievements. Organ transplants give new life to more than twenty thousand Americans annually (United Network for Organ Sharing 1999). However, the organ procurement and distribution...

Assessing population health care need using a claims-based ACG morbidity measure: a validation analysis in the province of Manitoba.
October 1, 2002... Methods to quantify the burden of morbidity in populations and the resulting need for health care services have important applications in the management and financing of health systems. In the 1980s and 1990s, escalating health care costs...

An approach to forecasting health expenditures, with application to the U.S. Medicare system.
October 1, 2002... The United States devoted 13.6 percent of its GDP (gross domestic product) to health care in 1998, more than any other OECD nation (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2000). Most of this was funded privately (55 percent),...

Using administrative data to identify indications for elective primary cesarean delivery.
October 1, 2002... National interest in cesarean rates stems from the National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference in 1981 (National Institutes of Health 1981). At that time, policymakers and health care advocates were concerned about the wide variation in...

A demonstration of the impact of response bias on the results of patient satisfaction surveys.
October 1, 2002... In recent years, health care organizations, policymakers, advocacy groups, and individual consumers have become increasingly concerned about the quality of health care. One result of this concern is the widespread use of patient satisfaction...

Trust in the medical profession: conceptual and measurement issues.
October 1, 2002... Owing to the central importance of trust in medical relationships, there have been increasing efforts in recent years to measure patients' trust in their physicians and other care providers (Pearson and Raeke 2000; Hall, Zheng et al. 2002)....