STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to develop indices of the degree of collaboration between district nurses, general practitioners, and health visitors. DESIGN Semistructured interviews were conducted with each member of a pair of professionals who had patients in common. In each district a stratified random sample of six general practitioners and six community nurses was drawn, and for each a "par...

In this study, we infer health care indices of individuals using their pharmacy medical and prescription claims. Specifically, we focus on the widely used Charlson Index. We use data mining techniques to formulate the problem of classifying Charlson Index (CI) and build predictive models to predict individual health index score. First, we present comparative analyses of several classification a...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To examine the use of deprivation indices in relation to health. DESIGN This paper reviews selected publications which illustrate the diversity of use of deprivation indices in the past decade. Most of this work is based in the major routine databases which exist in this country: the census, population, mortality, cancer register, and health service records all now incorporate...

BACKGROUND The majority of social marketing programs are intended to reach the poor. It is therefore essential that social marketing organizations monitor the health equity of their programs and improve targeting when the poor are not being reached. Current measurement approaches are often insufficient for decision making because they fail to show a program's ability to reach the poor and demon...

Dentistry is unique in utilizing objective indices to measure the deviation of oral health components from ideal. Examples include various plaque, caries experience, tooth wear and periodontal indices (Quigley & Hein, 1962; Silness & Löe, 1964; Acharya, 2006; Hooper et al., 2004; Ainamo et al., 1982; Croxson, 1984). However, objective assessment of malocclusion has been different since malocclu...