Health Services Research articles from October 2004

Health Services Research archives from October 2004

Learn the ins and outs of health policymaking in Washington.(AcademyHealth Update)("Health Policy and Politics: An Orientation to Decision-Making in Washington," October 25-28, 2004)(Calendar)
October 1, 2004... Attend AcademyHealth's "Health Policy and Politics: An Orientation to Decision-Making in Washington," October 25-28, 2004, and learn from Washington insiders how health policy is really made. Through presentations by leading experts,...

Evidence-based health care 2004: AHRQ moves research to translation and implementation.(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Update)
October 1, 2004... "Given the ever-growing sophistication of our scientific knowledge and the additional new discoveries that are likely in the future, many of us harbor an uneasy, but quite realistic, suspicion that this gap between what we know about diseases...

From the Editors: external peer Review at HSR.(Health Services Research)(Editorial)
October 1, 2004... In 2003, we initiated a series of editorials entitled "From the Editors" that were designed to make our policies and procedures as transparent as possible. To date, we have written about our special issues and special sections, our...

Physician workforce data: when the best is not good enough.(Editorial)
October 1, 2004... In this issue of HSR, the article by Rittenhouse et al. (2004) calls into question two different sources of information about physicians' decisions to leave clinical practice: data from the Physician Masterfile of the American Medical...

Potentially inappropriate medication prescriptions among elderly nursing home residents: their scope and associated resident and facility characteristics.(Long-Term Care)
October 1, 2004... With pharmaceuticals being a principal mode of therapy, nursing home (NH) residents, on average, take 5 to 9 different medications daily and over 20 percent use more than 10 medications (Avorn and Guracitz 1995; Bernabei et al. 1999). High...

Socioeconomic disparities in the use of home health services in a Medicare managed care population.(Long-Term Care)
October 1, 2004... Home health care services are a critical part of both the long-term and acute care continuums for older Americans covered by Medicare. Use of the term "home health care" is inconsistent but often includes skilled nursing visits, home health...

Physical rehabilitation following Medicare prospective payment for skilled nursing facilities.(Long-Term Care)
October 1, 2004... Payment for nursing home care is an important policy concern for federal and state governments. Total government expenditures for nursing home care in the United States amounted to $58.2 billion in 1999 (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid...

Mental illness and length of inpatient stay for Medicaid recipients with AIDS.(Mental Health)
October 1, 2004... Minimizing length of stay (LOS) for hospitalized patients infected with AIDS without reducing quality of care or increasing frequency of hospitalization is desirable. Besides being expensive (Van Haastrecht et al. 1996), hospitalization days...

The cost-effectiveness of independent housing for the chronically mentally ill: do housing and neighborhood features matter?(Mental Health)
October 1, 2004... Housing has long been a neglected area in research on persons with chronic mental illness (CMI). As a result, there is little reliable information to guide important resource allocation decisions by both the public and private sectors. There...

The effects of state mental health parity legislation on perceived quality of insurance coverage, perceived access to care, and use of mental health specialty care.(Mental Health)
October 1, 2004... States have in recent years taken a more prominent role in social policy, including health care and welfare programs that were previously administered at the federal level (the so called "new federalism"). In the arena of health care policy,...

Cost shifting to jails after a change to managed mental health care.(Mental Health)
October 1, 2004... The fates of mentally ill persons have always been intertwined with the shifting boundaries between the criminal justice and mental health systems. Just as public mental hospitals once served as the institutions of last resort for the care and...

Associations of race, education, and patterns of preventive service use with stage of cancer at time of diagnosis.(Patients and Ambulatory Care)
October 1, 2004... The passage of Medicare in 1965 was accompanied by a confident expectation that covering most of the costs of physicians' and inpatient hospital services would remove the major barriers to health care for the elderly. A lingering concern was...

Monitoring visual status: why patients do or do not comply with practice guidelines.(Patients and Ambulatory Care)
October 1, 2004... National practice guidelines specify recommended diagnostic and treatment patterns for individuals at risk for particular conditions. Optimal care assumes adherence to guidelines. Yet, for a variety of conditions, compliance tends to be far...

Posthospital care transitions: patterns, complications, and risk identification.(Patients and Ambulatory Care)
October 1, 2004... Patients with continuous complex care needs frequently require care in multiple settings and are particularly vulnerable to poorly executed transitions (Coleman 2003; Coleman and Boult 2003). The extent to which medical errors, in general, and...

Plan, geographical, and temporal variation of consumer assessments of ambulatory health care.(Patients and Ambulatory Care)
October 1, 2004... The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have collected Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS [R]) survey data from beneficiaries of Medicare managed care plans that provide care to almost 5 million patients (Goldstein et...

Communities and hospitals: social capital, community accountability, and service provision in U.S. community hospitals.(Coverage and the Safety Net)
October 1, 2004... Despite its brief existence, the Clinton administration's health care reform gave rise to a renewed interest in containing the self-serving interests of health care organizations and in promoting those organizations' accountability toward...

The unintended impact of welfare reform on the Medicaid enrollment of eligible immigrants.(Coverage and the Safety Net)
October 1, 2004... The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 restricted most legal immigrants entering the United States after August 22, 1996, from receiving federally funded Medicaid for at least five years after...

Availability of safety net providers and access to care of uninsured persons.(Coverage and the Safety Net)
October 1, 2004... Although studies have consistently shown that uninsured persons have lower access to care than people with insurance coverage (Hadley 2003; Institute of Medicine 2002), uninsured persons can often obtain health services from providers who treat...

Subsidies and the demand for individual health insurance in California.(Coverage and the Safety Net)
October 1, 2004... More than 40 million Americans are uninsured. Policymakers and analysts widely agree that low incomes and high premiums are a primary cause. Thus, most proposals for reform include subsidies or public program expansions to reduce these barriers...

No exit: an evaluation of measures of physician attrition.(Providers and Incentives)
October 1, 2004... "... but what do numbers matter?" --Garcin, the protagonist of the play No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre Physician supply is the product of a dynamic interplay between production of new physicians and attrition of existing physicians....

The alignment and blending of payment incentives within physician organizations.(Providers and Incentives)
October 1, 2004... Physician organizations such as medical groups and independent practice associations (IPAs) function as financial intermediaries between the insurer and the individual physician (Robinson 1999b; Penner 1997; Gold et al. 2002). In "three-tier"...

The effect of HMOs on the inpatient utilization of Medicare beneficiaries.(Providers and Incentives)(Health Maintenance Organizations)
October 1, 2004... Over the past two decades, Congress has directed the Medicare program to foster the growth of managed care by offering generous payments to health maintenance organizations (HMOs) (General Accounting Office 1999). Health maintenance...

Correction to: A Longitudinal Examination of Hospital Registered Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care.(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2004... In the article "A Longitudinal Examination of Hospital Registered Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care" (Marks, Harless, McCue, Xu, Health Services Research 39 (2):279-300), an error was made in the listing of states participating in the sample...