BACKGROUND Waiting lists for treatment are common in outpatient and community services, Existing methods for managing access and triage to these services can lead to inequities in service delivery, inefficiencies and divert resources from frontline care. Evidence from two controlled studies indicates that an alternative to the traditional "waitlist and triage" model known as STAT (Specific Time...

Introduction Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme (CHIS) in Kerala is a modification of the national social health insurance scheme called Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). We aimed to (a) compare the socio-demographic and health utilization pattern (outpatient and inpatient services) of below poverty line (BPL) households insured under CHIS; (b) find the percentage hospitalization covere...

We investigated the racial and ethnic variation in health service use among stroke survivors with informal caregivers in a number of Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers in one Veterans Integrated Service Network in the southeastern United States. We focused on the role of caregivers as an enabling factor in the use of health services. One hundred twenty-five veterans who had been hos...

This paper examines mental health service use among publicly insured white and African-American pregnant and postpartum women who live in a metropolitan area. The study examines the extent to which ethnicity, physical health problems, and behavioral health risk factors are associated with the probability of service use during the prenatal-postpartum period. It also analyzes the patterns of serv...

OBJECTIVE To develop an inventory of data sources for estimating health care costs in the United States and provide information to aid researchers in identifying appropriate data sources for their specific research questions. METHODS We identified data sources for estimating health care costs using 3 approaches: (1) a review of the 18 articles included in this supplement, (2) an evaluation of...

BACKGROUND This study aims to investigate the differences in the utilization of healthcare services between patients with bladder pain syndrome/interstitial cystitis (BPS/IC) and patients without using a population-based database in Taiwan. METHODS This study comprised of 350 patients with BPS/IC and 1,750 age-matched controls. Healthcare resource utilization was evaluated in the one-year fol...

BACKGROUND In 1993, Colombia underwent an ambitious and comprehensive process of health system reform based on managed competition and structured pluralism, but did not include coverage for mental health services. AIMS OF THE STUDY In this study, we sought to evaluate the impact of the reform on access to mental health services and whether there were changes in the pattern of mental health se...

background this paper aims to investigate the development trend of traditional chinese medicine (tcm) hospitals in china and explore their medical service innovations, with special reference to the changing co-existence with western medicine (wm) at tcm hospitals.   methods quantitative data at macro level was collected from official databases of china health statistical yearbook and extracts o...