BACKGROUND As healthcare spending continues to increase, medical insurance is now under great pressure of growing economic burden. To control the excessive growth of medical expenditure, change of medical payment system was clearly put forward in China's new healthcare reform. With this end, Tianjin, a large city in North China, is now exploring to replace traditional fee-for-service (FFS) with...

In recent years, medical and health care consumption has risen, making health risk an important determinant of household spending and welfare. We aimed to examine the determinants of medical and health care expenditure to help policy-makers in the improvement of China's health care system, benefiting the country, society and every household. This paper employs panel data from China's provinces ...

Epidemic levels of inactivity are associated with chronic diseases and rising healthcare costs. To address this, accelerometers have been used to track levels of activity. The Fitbit and Fitbit Ultra are some of the newest commercially available accelerometers. The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability and validity of the Fitbit and Fitbit Ultra. Twenty-three subjects were fitt...

This paper studies the phenomenon of service-led growth in India over the past two decades from the perspective of household expenditure. We use consumption expenditure data from four recent “thick” rounds of the National Sample Survey in 1993-94, 2004-05, 2009-10 and 2011-12, and study aggregate services as well as 5 individual categories – education, healthcare, transportation, entertainment,...

T otal healthcare expenditure in countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has risen from an average of 5% of gross domestic product in 1970 to ,10% in 2002 [1]. In 2002, pharmaceutical expenditure ranged from 10% of the total healthcare expenditure in Sweden to 21% in France [1], and a major portion of this expenditure arose through hospital care. Chronic obstructi...

A shortcoming of many economic evaluations is that they do not include all medical costs in life-years gained (also termed indirect medical costs). One of the reasons for this is the practical difficulties in the estimation of these costs. While some methods have been proposed to estimate indirect medical costs in a standardized manner, these methods fail to take into account that not all costs...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Energy expenditure in severe sepsis/septic shock patients was measured by indirect calorimetry and the correlation of energy expenditure between indirect calorimetry and predictive equations was determined. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN This was a prospective, observational analytical study. Severe sepsis or septic shock patients were measured for energy expenditure over ...

BACKGROUND Developing countries have witnessed economic growth as their GDP keeps increasing steadily over the years. The growth led to higher energy consumption which eventually leads to increase in air pollutions that pose a danger to human health. People's healthcare demand, in turn, increase due to the changes in the socioeconomic life and improvement in the health technology. This study is...

ABBREVIATIONS. MEPS, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey; HCUP, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project; AHCPR, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research; HC, Household Component; MPC, Medical Provider Component; IC, Insurance Component; ICD-9-CM, International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification; SID, State Inpatient Databases; NIS, Nationwide Inpatient Sample; AHA, A...

• Cancer has an inverse expenditure/disease burden ratio, accounting for 19% of all deaths and premature deaths (the highest of any disease group) and 7% of healthcare costs. As 65% of those costs are for inpatient services, greater investment in cancer prevention and early detection, as outlined in this submission, would reduce hospital costs while addressing the increasingly disproportionate ...