BACKGROUND To assess the inequity in seeking needed outpatient services in Iran and to investigate its influential factors. METHOD The data were taken from a nation-wide Iranian health survey conducted in 2003. This study is based on individuals aged 15 years and over who had mentioned their need to seek outpatient care within two weeks prior to the day of the interview. The outcome was seeki...

The rapid growth in outpatient expenditures and the congressional mandate for development of a prospective payment system (PPS) for these expenditures are discussed. Extension of diagnosis-related groups to outpatient care is shown to be infeasible. Alternative patient classification schemes and options for defining the unit of payment and establishing weights and rates are discussed. A PPS pri...

Efforts to improve patient safety have largely focused on inpatient or emergency settings, but the importance of patient safety in ambulatory care is increasingly being recognized as a key component of overall health care quality. Care gaps in outpatient settings may include missed diagnoses, medication errors, or insufficient monitoring of patients with chronic conditions or on certain medicat...

OBJECTIVE To explore reasons for attending a general emergency outpatient clinic versus a regular general practitioner (RGP). DESIGN Cross-sectional study using a multilingual anonymous questionnaire. SETTING Native and immigrant walk-in patients attending a general emergency outpatient clinic in Oslo (Monday-Friday, 08:00-23:00) during 2 weeks in September 2009. SUBJECTS We included 1022...

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to investigate the direct cost of outpatient care for patients with stroke, as well as the relationship between the aforementioned cost and the sociodemographic and stroke characteristics of the patients. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study involving patients with first-ever stroke who were attending outpatient stroke rehabilitation, and their family members...

OBJECTIVE Validate risk-adjusted readmission rates as a measure of inpatient quality of care after accounting for outpatient facilities, using premature infants as a test case. STUDY SETTING Surviving infants born between January 1, 1998 and December 12, 2001 at five Northern California Kaiser Permanente neonatal intensive care units (NICU) with 1-year follow-up at 32 outpatient facilities. ...

BACKGROUND In the 1990s, China introduced a "free" tuberculosis (TB) care policy under the national TB control program. Recently, as a part of a new TB diagnosis and treatment model, it has been recommended that the integrated model scale up. This paper examines whether or not TB designated hospitals in the selected project sites have provided TB care according to the national and local guideli...

Psychosocial intervention has been found to be related to subsequent reductions in health care use. Studies generally measure this ‘‘offset effect’’ by combining medical use categories into one outcome variable, such as outpatient doctor visits. However, using a general outcome variable may obscure more specific patterns of reduction. In an effort to identify potential ‘‘targets’’ for mental he...

OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that electronic patient-provider messaging is associated with high care quality for diabetes and lower outpatient utilization. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of electronic patient-provider messaging over a 15-month period between 1 January 2004 and 31 March 2005. The study was set at Group Health Cooperative--a consumer-gov...