The state of physician recruitment changed after the Internal Revenue Service required Hermann Hospital to publish its closing agreement with the IRS. The closing agreement released the long-awaited IRS "Hospital Physician Recruitment Guidelines." The IRS' recently proposed revenue ruling provides additional insight on acceptable physician recruitment practices as well.

results we performed rush on 77 patients. kappa index was 0.71 (p value = 0.000), reflecting acceptable general agreement between initial impression and final diagnosis. for hypovolemic, cardiogenic and obstructive shock, the protocol had an npv above 97% yet it had a lower ppv. for shock with distributive or mixed etiology, rush showed a ppv of 100% but it had low sensitivity. subgroup analysi...

BACKGROUND To examine the agreement between depression symptoms using an assessment tool (PHQ-9), and physician documentation of the same symptoms during a clinic visit, and then to examine how the presence of these symptoms affects depression diagnosis in primary care settings. METHODS Interviewer administered surveys and medical record reviews. A total of 304 participants were recruited fro...

BACKGROUND Physicians may be unaware of the severity and extent of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) in their patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate patient-physician agreement concerning proton pump inhibitor (PPI) treatment. METHODS 1818 French primary-care physicians and 5174 adult patients with GERD who were taking PPIs answered questions regarding symptoms and treatment sat...

BACKGROUND Assessment of health-related status has been shown to vary between patients and physicians, although the degree of patient-physician discordance in the assessment of the change in status is unknown. METHODS Ninety-nine patients with shoulder dysfunction underwent a standardized physician examination and completed several self-reported questionnaires. All patients were prescribed th...

BACKGROUND To examine nurse-physician inter-observer agreement on triage categorization and analyze their differences for future reference. METHODS A retrospective observational study was performed. Patients entering a 3500-bed medical center emergency department (ED) from July 1 to 31, 1998 were randomly selected. We compared triage assignments made by nurses and 2 ED physicians, and examine...

INTRODUCTION Worldwide, injuries account for 9.8% of all deaths. The majority of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries where vital registration systems are often inadequate. Verbal autopsy (VA) is a tool used to ascertain cause of death in such settings. Validation studies for VA using hospital diagnosed causes of death as comparisons have shown that injury deaths can be reliab...

OBJECTIVE To investigate concordance between physicians and parents in rating the degree of functional ability of children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). METHODS The attending physician and a parent were asked to rate independently the level of physical functioning of 155 patients with disease duration >/= 5 years on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 = no disability (i.e. the child ca...

BACKGROUND The Indian Sample Registration System (SRS) with verbal autopsy methods provides estimations of cause specific mortality for maternal deaths, where the majority of deaths occur at home, unregistered. We aim to examine factors that influence physician agreement and coding choices in assigning causes of death from verbal autopsies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Among adult deaths id...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to develop and validate a novel self-administered questionnaire for assessing the patient's own range of motion (ROM) of the wrist and the elbow. METHODS In a prospective clinical study from January 2015 to June 2015, 101 consecutive patients were evaluated with a novel, self-administered, diagram-based, wrist motion assessment score (W-MAS) and elbow moti...