BACKGROUND The fragmented nature of health care delivery in the United States leads to fragmented health information and impedes patient care continuity and safety. Technologies to support interorganizational health information exchange (HIE) are becoming more available. Understanding how HIE technology changes health care delivery and affects people and organizations is crucial to long-term su...

PURPOSE This article describes a strategy for rural providers, communities, and policy makers to support or establish accountable care organizations (ACOs). METHODS ACOs represent a new health care delivery and provider payment system designed to improve clinical quality and control costs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) makes contracts with ACOs a permanent option under ...

Background Healthcare organisations in England rated as inadequate in terms of leadership and one other domain enter the Special Measures for Quality (SMQ) regime to receive increased support and oversight. There is also a ‘watch list’ of challenged National Health Service (NHS) providers at risk of going into SMQ that receive support. There is limited knowledge about whether the interven...

BACKGROUND Incentives offered by the U.S. government have spurred marked increases in use of health information technology (IT). PURPOSE To update previous reviews and examine recent evidence that relates health IT functionalities prescribed in meaningful use regulations to key aspects of health care. DATA SOURCES English-language articles in PubMed from January 2010 to August 2013. STUDY...

INTRODUCTION Despite recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that all adults be offered non-targeted HIV screening in all care settings, screening in acute-care settings remains unacceptably low. We performed an observational study to evaluate an HIV screening pilot in an academic-community partnership health center urgent care clinic. METHODS We collected visit data via enco...

Immigrant Latino women represent about one fifth of the total Latino population; however, data on health status and access to care for this population is limited. Using secondary data, we used a cross-sectional study to examine sociodemographic, migration, health status, and access to health care characteristics of immigrant documented and undocumented Latino women in North Texas. Undocumented ...

background: to test if social support and ethnicity mediate/moderate the association between religion involvement and subjective health in the united states. methods: this is a secondary analysis of national survey of american life, 2003. hierarchical regression was fit to a national household probability sample of adult african americans ( n = 3570), caribbean blacks ( n = 1621), and whites ( ...

Providing health care for a woman with a surrogate pregnancy involves unique challenges. Although the ethical debate surrounding surrogacy continues, Canada has banned commercial, but not altruistic, surrogacy. In the event of a custody dispute between a surrogate mother and the individual(s) intending to parent the child, it is unclear how Canadian courts would rule. The prenatal health care p...