Page 287 of 288
Length of stay (LOS) is an important indicator of efficiency for inpatient care but it does not achieve an adequate performance if it is not adjusted for the case mix of the patients hospitalized during the pe...
In this study we examined the influence of type of insurance and the influence of managed care in particular, on the length of stay decisions physicians make and on variation in medical practice.
In the U.S. small-area health services research studies are often based on the hospital service areas (HSAs) defined by the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare project. These areas are based on the geographic origin...
Until recently, premarital examination for both men and women was a legal requirement before marriage in China. Researchers have carried out surveys of attendees' sexual activity, pregnancy and abortion before...
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is defined by symptoms and disability, has no confirmatory physical signs or characteristic laboratory abnormalities, and the etiology and pathophysiology remain unknown. Difficu...
Research has shown that many healthcare professionals have problems with guidelines as they would prefer to be given all relevent information relevent to decision-making rather than being told what they should...
Clinical practice guidelines are systematically developed statements designed to assist in patient and physician clinical decision making for specific clinical circumstances. In order to establish which guidel...
Biomedical research constantly produces new findings but these are not routinely translated into health care practice. One way to address this problem is to develop effective interventions to translate researc...
A survey was carried out in the Grampian region of Scotland with a random sample of 10,000 adults registered with a General Practitioner in Grampian. The study complied with new legislation requiring a two-sta...
In the US, Quality Indicators (QI's) profiling and comparing the performance of hospitals, health plans, nursing homes and physicians are routinely published for consumer review. We report the results of the l...
Obesity treatment is notoriously unsuccessful and one of the barriers to successful weight loss reported by patients is a lack of social support. The Internet offers a novel and fast approach to the delivery o...
All clinical practice guidelines recommend thiazides as a first-choice drug for the management of uncomplicated hypertension. Thiazides are also the lowest priced antihypertensive drugs. Despite this, the use ...
The purpose of this study was to determine the direct medical US cost of managing multiple sclerosis relapses.
Low back pain has major health and social implications. Although there have been many randomised controlled trials of manipulation and exercise for the management of low back pain, the role of these two treatm...
Interventions to improve delivery of preventive medical services have been shown to be effective in North America and the UK. However, there are few studies of the extent to which the impact of such interventi...
The term "evidence-based medicine" (or EBM) was introduced about ten years ago, and there has been considerable debate about the value of EBM. However, this debate has sometimes been obscured by a lack of conc...
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in the United States. Previous research examining physicians ability to estimate cardiovascular risk has shown that physicians' generally overestimate...
There have been dramatic increases in the number of coronary artery bypass surgeries (CABS) and percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) performed during the last decade. Whether this finding is true for reva...
The value of the Internet to deliver preoperative education would increase if there was variability in questions patients want answered. This study's goal was to have patients consulting an orthopedic surgeon ...
Electronic medical record (EMR) systems are used for many purposes including patient care, administration, research, quality improvement and reimbursement. This study aimed to test a data extraction tool (QToo...
Social support is important in daily activities of the elderly. This study tests the hypothesis that there is an association between social support and cognitive function among the elderly in a community setting.
General practitioners often diverge from clinical guidelines regarding spine radiography. This study aimed to identify and describe A) factors general practitioners consider may affect their decisions about or...
Decision makers need to have Canadian-specific cost information in order to develop an accurate picture of diabetes management. The objective of this study is to estimate direct medical costs of managing compl...
Recent studies suggest that patients at greatest risk for diabetes complications are least likely to self-monitor blood glucose. However, these studies rely on self-reports of monitoring, an unreliable measure...
The underlying reasons for differences between clinical practice and systematically developed guidelines vary from one clinical problem to another. It is therefore logical to tailor strategies to support the i...
In diabetes mellitus, cigarette smoking is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and microvascular complications. We evaluated cigarette smoking in people with diabetes mellitus in a socio...
Theories of behaviour change indicate that an analysis of factors that facilitate or impede change is helpful when trying to influence professional practice. The aim of this study was to identify barriers to i...
Despite the growing reputation and subject coverage of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, many systematic reviews continue to be published solely in paper-based health care journals. This study was d...
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 gave states the option to withdraw Medicaid coverage of nonemergency care from most legal immigrants. Our goal was to assess...
Documentation in the medical record facilitates the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Few studies have assessed the quality of outpatient medical record documentation, and to the authors' knowledge, none ha...
The benefit of regular multidimensional assessment of older people remains controversial. The majority of trials have been too small to produce adequate evidence to inform policy. Despite the lack of a firm ev...
The aim of the present work was to investigate the relative importance of socio-demographic and physical health status factors for subjective functioning, as well as to examine the role of social support.
The aim of this study was to examine the acceptability of point of care computerized prompts to improve health services delivery among a sample of primary care patients.
There has been increasing concern regarding the potential effects of the commercialization of research.
Antibiotics are frequently prescribed for older adults who reside in long-term care facilities. A substantial proportion of antibiotic use in this setting is inappropriate. Antibiotics are often prescribed for...
Several clinical practice guidelines (CPG) on antithrombotic prophylaxis in surgical patients help to decide about the prophylaxis strategy based on the patient risk of deep venous thrombosis (DVT). However, t...
Postal surveys are a popular instrument for studies about continuing medical education habits. But little is known about the accuracy of responses in such surveys. The objective of this study was to quantify t...
Decision makers in health care organizations struggle with how to set priorities for new technologies in medicine. Traditional approaches to priority setting for new technologies in medicine are insufficient a...
Trials of complex health interventions often pose difficult methodologic challenges. The objective of this paper is to assess the extent to which the various development steps of a cluster randomized trial to ...
There has been a relentless increase in emergency medical admissions in the UK over recent years. Many of these patients suffer with chronic conditions requiring continuing medical attention. We wished to dete...
Although systematic reviews of health care interventions are an invaluable tool for health care providers and researchers, many potential authors never publish reviews. This study attempts to determine why som...
A variety of approaches have been used to contain escalating hospital costs. One approach is intensifying price competition. The increase in price based competition, which changes the incentives hospitals face...
We aim to establish the evidence base for the recognition and management of obstetric anal sphincter injury (OASI) and to compare this with current practice amongst UK obstetricians and coloproctologists.
Checklists for peer review aim to guide referees when assessing the quality of papers, but little evidence exists on the extent to which referees agree when evaluating the same paper. The aim of this study was...
Practice guidelines have been developed in response to the observation that variations exist in clinical medicine that are not related to variations in the clinical presentation and severity of the disease. De...
Organizational features can affect how staff view their quality of work life. Determining staff perceptions about quality of work life is an important consideration for employers interested in improving employ...
Whilst there is broad agreement on what constitutes high quality health care for people with diabetes, there is little consensus on the most efficient way of delivering it. Structured recall systems can improv...
There are a variety of ways in which accuracy of clinical tests can be summarised in systematic reviews. Variation in reporting of summary measures has only been assessed in a small survey restricted to meta-a...
In 1992, Evidence-Based Medicine advocates proclaimed a "new paradigm", in which evidence from health care research is the best basis for decisions for individual patients and health systems. Hailed in New Yor...
Economic evaluations alongside clinical trials are becoming increasingly common. Cost data are often collected through the use of postal questionnaires; however, the accuracy of this method is uncertain. We co...
