BACKGROUND A critical assessment of current health care practices, as well as the training needs of various health care providers, is crucial for improving patient care. Several approaches have been proposed for defining these needs with attention on communication as a key competency for effective collaboration. Taking our cultural context, resource limitations, and small-scale setting into acc...

We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behavior. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality and precautionary saving. We find that in lower quality districts there is greater income and health di...

America’s hospitals and health systems are making a significant commitment to improving health care quality and innovation. Hospitals and health systems have demonstrated notable progress in recent years in quality improvement and transformation. As evident in numerous local and national efforts, health care outcomes across the six Institute of Medicine aims (care that is safe, timely, effectiv...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to explore the structural mechanisms that facilitate or counteract collaboration between general practitioners (GPs) and other providers of municipal healthcare. Good collaboration between these actors is crucial for high-quality care, especially for persons in need of coordinated services. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study is based on semistructured intervi...

On February 4, 2010 the Illinois Supreme Court struck down Illinois' medical practice reform bill, P.A. 94-677, when it decided Lebron v. Gottlieb Memorial Hospital. Although the court only considered the unconstitutionality of the cap on non-economic damages contained in that bill, an inseverability provision resulted in the invalidation of all of its provisions. The end result of the Lebron d...

A study Looking at quality and cost issues for integrated vs. non integrated physician practices yields some interesting findings.

In tracing developments in health care quality, a number of different approaches to quality evaluation can be identified, differing in terms of the specific focus and means of achieving quality. This paper attempts to classify the development of quality in health care, drawing on experiences within the industrial quality movement. Three distinct models of quality evaluation are described, accor...

OBJECTIVES Healthy People 2010 calls for greater access to high-quality primary care as a means to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in children' health. Disparities in primary care quality have rarely been studied for children, and the few studies that have been conducted among adults are not readily applicable to children because of the different health care needs of the 2 populations. Thi...

The internet is becoming increasingly important in health care practice. The number of health-related web sites is rising exponentially as people seek health-related information and services to supplement traditional sources, such as their local doctor, friends, or family. The development of e-medicine poses important ethical challenges, both for health professionals and for those who provide c...