BACKGROUND The need to understand preferred sources of health information remains important to providing patient-centered care. The Internet remains a popular resource for health information, but more traditional sources may still be valid for patients during a recent health need. This study sought to understand the characteristics of patients that turn to their doctor or healthcare provider fi...

OBJECTIVE To compare medical care costs and utilization in a consumer-driven health plan (CDHP) to other health insurance plans. STUDY DESIGN We examine claims and employee demographic data from one large employer that adopted a CDHP in 2001. A quasi-experimental pre-post design is used to assign employees to three cohorts: (1) enrolled in a health maintenance organization (HMO) from 2000 to ...

Leaders in health care and health care policy believe the U.S. must rein in the growth of health spending, and most believe it is possible over the next 10 years to maintain the current proportion of gross domestic product devoted to health care, the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey finds. Nearly all respondents (96%) agreed that spending must slow, ...

OBJECTIVE National recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners promote that all children obtain quality primary care through a consistent medical provider who can better assess, diagnose, and monitor a child's health. The purpose of this article was to identify characteristics of children in Florida without a personal healt...

OBJECTIVE Some argue that health plans have minimal impacts on quality of care and that quality data collection should focus only on physician organizations. We investigate the relative impact of physician organizations and health plans on quality measures. DESIGN Statistical analysis of data on 9 Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures from 6 health plans and 159 p...

BACKGROUND In a previous study, we reported on a successful clinical decision support (CDS) intervention designed to improve electronic problem list accuracy, but did not study variability of provider response to the intervention or provider attitudes towards it. The alert system accurately predicted missing problem list items based on health data captured in a patient's electronic medical reco...

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is a rural, academic medical center in the northeastern United States; its General Internal Medicine (GIM) division performs about 900 low and intermediate surgical risk preoperative evaluations annually. Routine preoperative testing in these evaluations is widely considered a low-value service. Our baseline data sample showed unnecessary testing rates of appr...

BACKGROUND AND AIM Self-management support is an integral part of current chronic care guidelines. The success of self-management interventions varies between individual patients, suggesting a need for tailored self-management support. Understanding the role of patient factors in the current decision making of health professionals can support future tailoring of self-management interventions. T...

BACKGROUND Lesbians have more health risks than other women but access preventive medical care less frequently. OBJECTIVE To test the influence of (i) provider inquiry about sexual orientation, (ii) perceived provider gay-positivity and (iii) patient disclosure of sexual orientation on regular health care use in a sample of Canadian lesbians. METHODS A path analysis using community survey d...