Health Services Research articles from October 2005

Health Services Research archives from October 2005

Academy health update.
October 1, 2005... AcademyHealth Health Policy Orientation October 24-27, 2005 Limited Space Available: Register by September 30 Now in its 4th year, this 3 1/2 day orientation has grown to be a highly regarded program that provides a behind the scenes look...

Research funding opportunities: fiscal year 2006.(AHRQ Update)
October 1, 2005... In the June 2004 AHRQ Update, we unveiled the new mission and strategic goals of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The update detailed AHRQ's reinvigorated focus on ensuring that the research we support is translated into...

Employer health insurance offerings and employee enrollment decisions.(health benefits)
October 1, 2005... Although the vast majority of individuals under the age of 65 obtain health insurance through an employer, considerable variation exists across employers in the health benefits they offer to workers. While many, particularly small employers,...

Medicare beneficiaries and the impact of gaining prescription drug coverage on inpatient and physician spending.(Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003)
October 1, 2005... Far-reaching changes in the Medicare program are expected with the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (PL 108-172), not the least of which is planning for the expenditures of the approximately...

The impact of reference pricing of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents on the use and costs of analgesic drugs.(Insurance, Prescription Coverage and Pricing)
October 1, 2005... Faced with growing drug expenditures, drug insurance plan executives have adopted various cost containment measures. One such policy, reference pricing (RP), limits drug plan reimbursement of interchangeable medicines to a reference price,...

Putting smart money to work for quality improvement.(reward quality)
October 1, 2005... The influential 2001 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) made public an analysis of quality problems in the U.S. health care system and put forth recommendations for quality improvement (Institute of Medicine 2001). One of the report's...

Cross-functional team processes and patient functional improvement.(Organizational Processes and Quality)
October 1, 2005... Cross-functional teams (CFTs), also known as multidisciplinary teams, play an important role in the U.S. health care system (Fried, Topping, and Rundall 2000). Indeed, the IOM has recently identified improving the performance of CFTs as a major...

Factors associated with interorganizational relationships among outpatient drug treatment organizations 1990-2000.(Organizational Processes and Quality)
October 1, 2005... Much of health care policy now revolves around decisions about when and how to foster competition and cooperation, understanding that care providers typically offer the best services at the lowest prices when there is a blend of both factors....

Factors affecting plan choice and unmet need among supplemental security income eligible children with disabilities.(Organizational Processes and Quality)
October 1, 2005... During the 1990s most states required that large percentages of their nondisabled Medicaid beneficiaries enroll in capitated managed care (MC) plans. Relatively few states, however, imposed such mandates on children with special health care...

Impact of generalist care managers on patients with diabetes.(Specialist and Generalist Services)
October 1, 2005... Diabetes mellitus and its complications comprise one of the most expensive categories of chronic disease in the United States, contributing to at least 213,062 deaths in 2000 and $132 billion in costs in 2002. There is significant potential for...

Are primary care services a substitute or complement for specialty and inpatient services?(Specialist and Generalist Services)
October 1, 2005... The Institute of Medicine has defined primary care as the provision of integrated, accessible health care services by clinicians who are accountable for addressing the majority of personal health care needs, developing a sustained partnership...

The impact of allergy and pulmonary specialist care on emergency asthma utilization in a large managed care organization.(Specialist and Generalist Services)
October 1, 2005... During the past 20 years, the U.S. morbidity and mortality from asthma have been increasing (Mannino et al. 1998, 2002). In an effort to improve asthma care, the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) published guidelines for...

Medicaid managed care and health care for children.(Child Health Care)
October 1, 2005... Faced with rising expenditures for health care, hoping to improve access to care for their beneficiary population, and impressed by the apparent successes of managed care in the private sector, many state governments moved significant portions...

Managed care and gender disparities in problematic health care experiences.(Managed Health Care)
October 1, 2005... In 2003, 95 percent of persons with employer-sponsored health insurance were enrolled in some form of managed care (including HMOs, PPOs, and POS plans) (Kaiser Family Foundation 2003a). Although managed care has the potential to improve care...

Social and economic determinants of disparities in professional help-seeking for child mental health problems: evidence from a national sample.(Managed Health Care)
October 1, 2005... Considerable evidence exists that children's mental health problems are undertreated, with fewer than half and as few as 11 percent of children who screen positive for some disorder actually receiving treatment (Zahner et al. 1992; Cohen and...

The effect of income question design in health surveys on family income, poverty and eligibility estimates.(Methods)
October 1, 2005... Income is an important and challenging concept to measure in household health surveys. Income is highly associated with a wide array of important health, economic, and sociological outcomes (Williams 1990; Link and Phelan 1995; Krieger,...

A self-report measure of clinicians' orientation toward integrative medicine.(Methods)
October 1, 2005... Patients commonly use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in combination with conventional medical treatment outside the purview of their physicians (Eisenberg, Davis, and Ettner 1998). Such patient-initiated "integrative medicine" has...

Health services research: critical measurement issues.(Veterans Health Administration)(Editorial)
October 1, 2005... As the largest integrated health care system in the United States, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is responsible for treating more than 5 million patients each year at 1,400 sites of care that include medical centers, hospitals,...

Measurement in veterans affairs health services research: veterans as a special population.
October 1, 2005... The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development (VA HSR&D) service has been a leader in focusing on system-wide measurement excellence, in part because veterans represent a distinct and special population....

Validity of measures is no simple matter.
October 1, 2005... It is common in published articles in the social and behavioral sciences to encounter a statement to the effect that a measure used in research can be considered "valid." In reviewing research proposals for scientific review committees,...

Integrating validity theory with use of measurement instruments in clinical settings.
October 1, 2005... Validity of measurement instruments is crucial to successful health outcomes measurement and to the health decision making that follows, a point often stated in the clinical research literature. The importance of validity is particularly...

Measuring diagnoses: ICD code accuracy.(International Classification of Diseases)
October 1, 2005... Nosology (the systematic classification of diseases) has always fascinated the sick and their would-be healers. Western societies developed an interest in nosology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they began to track the causes...

Measurement issues in health disparities research.(mortality rates)
October 1, 2005... The proportion of both minority and older adults in the United States is growing; as a result, the older population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse (Ford and Hatchett 2001; Sinclair et al. 2002; Federal Interagency Forum on...

Conceptualizing and categorizing race and ethnicity in health services research.(health services research)
October 1, 2005... The appropriate assessments of race and ethnicity are crucial to health services research. Data based on racial and ethnic classifications are used by many federal and state agencies, public and private organizations, and the private business...

Proxies and other external raters: methodological considerations.(information management)
October 1, 2005... Health services researchers often need to collect information about patients from external raters (as opposed to internally referenced self-reports) because a patient is sick/impaired/unavailable/deceased or because another perspective on the...

Dynamic assessment of health outcomes: time to let the CAT out of the bag?
October 1, 2005... Measures of patient-centered outcomes are critical to health services research since they supply information on which clinical and health policy decisions may be made. Patient-level data is used to track important health variables including...