BACKGROUND Although N95 filtering facepiece respirators and medical masks are commonly used for protection against respiratory infections in healthcare settings, more clinical evidence is needed to understand the optimal settings and exposure circumstances for healthcare personnel to use these devices. A lack of clinically germane research has led to equivocal, and occasionally conflicting, hea...

Measurement forms the basis for empirical health services research including pharmaceutical practice and policy research. The measurement process is designed to record and capture the underlying construct and concept. In healthcare, critical policy and practice discussions are based on cost, quality, and access. These concepts or constructs have to be measured and analyzed using variables to ev...

BACKGROUND The TATE trial was a multicentre pragmatic randomized controlled trial of supplementing primary care management (PCM)-consisting of a GP consultation followed by information and advice on exercises-with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), to reduce pain intensity in patients with tennis elbow. This paper reports the health economic evaluation. METHODS AND FINDINGS A...

mcdonough’s perspective on healthcare reform in the us provides a clear, coherent analysis of the mix of access and delivery reforms in the affordable care act (aca) aka obamacare. as noted by mcdonough, this major reform bill is designed to expand access for health coverage that includes both prevention and treatment benefits among uninsured americans. additionally, this legislation includes s...

OBJECTIVES To determine the demands on healthcare resources caused by different types of illnesses and variation with age and sex. DESIGN Information on healthcare use was obtained from all 22 healthcare sectors in the Netherlands. Most important sectors (hospitals, nursing homes, inpatient psychiatric care, institutions for mentally disabled people) have national registries. Total expenditur...

PURPOSE Changes in electroencephalography (EEG) patterns may offer a clue to the cause of altered mental status and suggest the prognoses of patients with such mental status. We aimed to identify the EEG patterns in patients with altered mental status and to correlate EEG findings with clinical prognoses. MATERIALS AND METHODS We included 105 patients with altered mental status who underwent ...

It has been realized that adoption and meaningful use of electronic medical records (EMR) can help clinicians diagnose and treat patients and researchers conduct clinical trials of new diagnostic methods and treatments. However, to improve the quality of but yet reduce the total cost of care, financial incentives must also be in place, such as payment mechanisms that reward health care provider...

Machine learning-based classification techniques provide support for the decision making process in the field of healthcare, especially in disease diagnosis, prognosis and screening. Healthcare datasets are voluminous in nature and their high dimensionality problem comprises in terms of slower learning rate and higher computational cost. Feature selection is expected to deal with the high dimen...

In an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Society titled “Race and Mortality,” I explained the statistical pattern, inherent in other than highly irregular risk distributions, whereby the rarer an outcome, the greater tends to be the relative (percentage) difference between the rates at which advantaged and disadvantaged groups experience the outcome and the smaller tends to be the re...

Malpractice litigation is now a substantial cost in the provision of healthcare. Despite new attitudes of Australian courts towards medical evidence, expert reports remain the cornerstone of most medical negligence cases. There is evidence that hindsight bias, which may cause the expert to simplify, trivialise and criticise retrospectively the decisions of the treating doctor, is inevitable whe...