BACKGROUND Limited accessibility to health care may be a barrier to obtaining good care. Few studies have investigated the association between access-to-care factors and COPD hospitalizations. The objective of this study is to estimate the association between access-to-care factors and health care utilization including hospital/emergency department (ED) visits and primary care physician (PCP) o...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Recent years have witnessed substantial gains in health insurance coverage for children, but few studies have examined trends across a diverse set of access indicators. We examine US children's access to health services and whether trends vary by race/ethnicity and income. METHODS Analysis of 178 038 children ages 0 to 17 from the 2000 to 2014 National Health Intervie...

BACKGROUND Prior to 2010, Medicare payments for consultations (commonly billed by specialists) were substantially higher than for office visits of similar complexity (commonly billed by primary care physicians). In January 2010, Medicare eliminated consultation payments from the Part B Physician Fee Schedule and increased fees for office visits. This change was intended to be budget neutral and...

OBJECTIVE This report assesses the impact of a series of education sessions delivered to office staff on the delivery of smoking cessation services among patients seeking care at a community-based women's health center. METHODS A quasi-experimental design was used to examine the delivery of smoking cessation services to patients in a medical office before and after office staff attended a ser...

BACKGROUND The United States Public Health Service (USPHS) Guideline for Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence includes ten key recommendations regarding the identification and the treatment of tobacco users seen in all health care settings. To our knowledge, the impact of system-wide brief interventions with cigarette smokers on smoking prevalence and health care utilization has not been examine...

BACKGROUND The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) coding system for office visits, which has been in use since 1995, has not been well studied, but it is generally agreed that the system contains much room for error. In fact, the available literature suggests that only slightly more than half of physicians will agree on the same CPT code for a given visit, and only 60% of professional coders ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the relationship between renal function and visit-to-visit blood pressure (BP) variability in a cohort of primary care patients. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study from routinely collected healthcare data. SETTING Primary care in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from 2007 to 2012. PARTICIPANTS 19 175 patients who had a measure of renal function, and 7 separate visits with ...