Beginning in 1984, the long-term trend of increasing utilization of inpatient hospital care by Medicare enrollees reversed. As Medicare patients increasingly received care in outpatient hospital facilities, ambulatory surgical centers, and physicians' offices, the structure of charges for physicians' services changed significantly. Medical services by physicians in inpatient hospitals declined ...

OBJECTIVE This naturalistic study aimed to identify criteria which are of relevance for making a decision as to whether inpatient or day hospital treatment is indicated. METHODS In 567 patients who were consecutively admitted to 10 departments of psychosomatic medicine (day hospital or inpatient setting) in Germany, symptom severity at admission and discharge was measured (Symptom-Check-List-...

towards his maintenance, and is asked to do so, nor the fact that a hospital patient can well afford to pay for treatment, and is expected to do so, vitiate the essentially voluntary character of the great bulk of the work in that hospital, which is certainly primarily intended for and mainly used by those who cannot afford to pay for such treatment. Any such payments are, of course, quite volu...

We used the State Inpatient Databases from the United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to provide state-specific age-adjusted blastomycosis-associated hospitalization incidence throughout the entire United States. Among the 46 states studied, states within the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys had the highest age-adjusted hospitalization incidence. Specifically, Wisconsin had ...

Handoff communication is identified as an integral part of hospital care. Throughout medical communities, inadequate handoff communication is being highlighted as a significant risk to patients. The complexity of hospitals and the number of providers involved in the care of hospitalized patients place inpatients at high risk of communication lapses. This miscommunication and the potential resul...

Nationally, there is strong interest in measuring hospital performance in patient safety. The Leapfrog Group uses a survey, along with other data sources, to calculate patient safety scores for 2600 hospitals across the United States. Under this methodology, every hospital is assigned 1 of 5 letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) depending on how the hospital stands in safety performance relative to all...

BACKGROUND The successful utilization of the balanced scorecard (BSC) framework in health care has been demonstrated in the literature. Given these successes, a financially struggling hospital implemented a BSC framework intervention which attempted a culture change centered upon patient satisfaction which it hoped would translate to improved financial stability. Despite the evidence of BSC suc...