BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study assesses the influence of primary care continuity--both clinician and system--on patient outcomes. We consider the presumed benefits of physician continuity and practice coordination within a multi-specialty group. METHODS The practices of 194 family physicians and general internists caring for 320000 adult members of a health maintenance organization were...

Methods A survey was sent to a random sample of 1,400 patients obtained from the AAOL newsletter database of 4,500 patients. The 20 question survey assessed patient demographics, perceived value of treatment, medication use, health and utilization ratings, compliance, school/work attendance, hospitalizations and unplanned physician visits and health related measures such as energy, sleep, and e...

BACKGROUND Over the past decade, physician-rating websites have been gaining attention in scientific literature and in the media. However, little knowledge is available about the awareness and the impact of using such sites on health care professionals. It also remains unclear what key predictors are associated with the knowledge and the use of physician-rating websites. OBJECTIVE To estimate...

BACKGROUND Physician associates, known internationally as physician assistants, are a mid-level practitioner, well established in the United States of America but new to the United Kingdom. A small number work in primary care under the supervision of general practitioners, where they most commonly see patients requesting same day appointments for new problems. As an adjunct to larger study, we ...

We consider the task of grouping doctors with respect to communication patterns exhibited in outpatient visits. We propose a novel approach toward this end in which we model speech act transitions in conversations via a log-linear model incorporating physician specific components. We train this model over transcripts of outpatient visits annotated with speech act codes and then cluster physicia...

background : during the past two decades, a great deal of research has been conducted on developing affective norms for words in various languages, showing that there is an urgent need to create such norms in persian language, too. the present study intended to develop a set of 362 persian words rated according to their emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and familiarity so as to prepare ...

Rating systems not only provide information to users but also motivate the rated agent. This paper solves for the optimal (effort-maximizing) rating system within the standard career concerns framework. It is a mixture two-state rating system. That is, it is the sum of two Markov processes, with one that reflects the belief of the rater and the other the preferences of the rated agent. The rati...