OBJECTIVE Up to 50% of pregnancies are unintended in the United States, and the healthcare costs associated with pregnancy are the most expensive among hospitalized conditions. The current study aims to assess Medicaid spending on various methods of contraception and on pregnancy care including unintended pregnancies. METHODS We analyzed Medicaid health claims data from 2004 to 2010. Women 14...

A challenge of current innovation in healthcare processes is to improve the time to treatment. This paper addresses the benefits of telematic services and mobile & wireless devices such as vital sign sensors and head mounted cameras for healthcare processes. It explores the telematic requirements for a distributed healthcare environment of Body Area Networks of the mobile devices which are conn...

This paper proposed an approach of intelligent healthcare services to support health monitoring of old people through the project named SAAPHO. Here, definition and architecture of the proposed healthcare services are presented considering six different health parameters such as: 1) physical activity, 2) blood pressure, 3) glucose, 4) medication compliance, 5) pulse monitoring and 6) weight mon...

BACKGROUND NHS Walk-in Centres have been introduced to improve access to healthcare in the UK. Little is understood about why people choose Walk-in Centres from among the range of options available to them. OBJECTIVES To explore users' accounts of choosing and using an NHS Walk-in Centre. METHODS Semi-structured interviews with 23 users who had recently attended an NHS Walk-in Centre were c...

OBJECTIVE Frequent users of healthcare services are a vulnerable population, often socioeconomically disadvantaged, who can present multiple chronic conditions as well as mental health problems. Case management (CM) is the most frequently performed intervention to reduce healthcare use and cost. This study aimed to examine the evidence of the effectiveness of CM interventions for frequent users...

The largest portion of the cost for asthma healthcare is due to hospitalizations. Improved methods of healthcare delivery for patients with asthma are needed to prevent readmissions. From 1996 to 1999, 96 adult subjects (predominantly young African American women) hospitalized with an asthma exacerbation, who had a history of frequent healthcare use, were randomized to an asthma nurse specialis...

Increasing workload and case complexity of a multimorbid ageing population have catalysed primary care transformation for general practitioners to meet these challenges. There is also need re-examine the role hospital specialists as overly disease-centric, hospital-based specialist no longer sustainable. A new specialist-generalist model can maximise potential generalists provide person-centred...

The enhancement of primary healthcare has been a core strategy for the empowerment of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). Recent guidelines issued by OPAS and the Ministry of Health highlight the role it has played as a thematic communication network center, a regulating agent for the access and use of services required for comprehensive healthcare. Sponsored by PPSUS/Fapesp, this study ...

1 Formal Logic with Conceptual Graphs 3 Frithjof Dau 1.