In 1993 the Rhode Island General Assembly mandated universal newborn hearing screening (UHNS) and required third-party payment for screenings (RI Public Law 23-23-13). Rhode Island was the first state in the nation to do so. Today 45 states and territories have statutes related to UNHS. A large body of research supports the effectiveness of newborn hearing screening in detecting hearing loss at...

The United States (US) is a nation of immigrants. The number of people who were born outside of the US has risen during the past 30 years. Eleven percent [33 million people] of the US population are foreign born.1 Rhode Island (RI) is both a home and a destination for immigrants from all over the world. Refugees and other immigrants present to the practitioner with clinical problems as varied a...

Effective communication between health care providers and immigrants who may speak little or no English is the foundation of evaluation and treatment and the most important component of the doctor-patient relationship. An immigrant in Rhode Island may speak any one of a number of languages; Spanish, Portuguese, Cambodian and Italian are the most widely spoken. Although many physicians and other...

This study tested the prediction that when the number of participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program exceeds a certain threshold an influence of coherence is created in the collective consciousness of society, resulting in a profound and measurable improvement in the quality of life. This prediction was tested by measuring the effects of an experimental intervention in th...

For over ten years, the Rhode Island Department of Health (HEALTH) has sponsored the monthly submission of Health by Numbers to Medicine & Health/Rhode Island. The principal reason for this collaboration has been to offer physicians a statewide perspective of the health status of the population and the characteristics of the health care system. A second reason has been to demonstrate to physici...

Ehrlichia chaffeensis, the causative agent of human monocytic ehrlichiosis, is transmitted by Amblyomma americanum ticks, which are most abundant in the southern United States. Because serologic evidence suggests that residents of Connecticut are exposed to E. chaffeensis, A. americanum ticks were collected in Connecticut and Rhode Island for PCR analysis to detect E. chaffeensis DNA. Eight of ...

Since 1975, Rhode Island has operated a government-sponsored catastrophic health insurance program that is consistent in spirit with several of the national health insurance proposals. An important but often overlooked effect of such a program is its effect on the distribution of income. Actual claims data for the years 1975-79 are available for the Rhode Island program permitting direct estima...