BACKGROUND Consumers rarely use publicly reported health care quality data. Despite known barriers to use, few studies have explored the effectiveness of strategies to overcome barriers in vulnerable populations. METHODS This randomized controlled trial tested the impact of a patient navigator intervention to increase consumer use of publicly reported quality data. Patients attending an urban...

Children's hospitals play a central role in our child health care system. These hospitals face unique challenges under health care reform. They care for children with the most complex medical problems but often are not reimbursed for good preventive care, care coordination, or quality. We discuss a proposal by children's hospital leaders to create a network of Nationally Designated Children's H...

BACKGROUND American Heart Association (AHA) defined 7 cardiovascular health metrics for the general population to improve cardiovascular health in 2010: not smoking; having normal blood pressure; being physically active; normal body mass index, blood glucose, and total cholesterol levels; and eating a healthy diet. To investigate trends in cardiovascular health metrics in Korea, we used data fr...

In wireless mesh networks, the routing of packets from source to destination is crucial and challenging task. The wireless mesh networks find applications in disaster management, video on demand, intelligent, health care systems, etc. Various routing protocols exist in literature to improve the efficiency of the wireless mesh networks calculated in terms of reliability, cost, throughput, error ...

OBJECTIVES To explore whether hospitalisations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) are associated with low access to primary care. DESIGN Observational cohort study over 2008 to 2012 using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) databases. SETTING English primary and secondary care. PARTICIPANTS A random sample of 300 000 patients....

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The American Heart Association has recently established seven ideal cardiovascular health metrics for cardiovascular health promotion and disease reduction (i.e., non-smoking, normal body mass index, physically active, healthy diet, and normal levels of cholesterol, blood pressure and fasting blood glucose). The present study seeks to evaluate how well these metrics predict ...

We assess the potential for medical liability forces to deter medical errors and improve health care treatment quality, identifying liability's influence by drawing on variations in the manner by which states formulate the negligence standard facing physicians. Using hospital discharge records from the National Hospital Discharge Survey and clinically-validated quality metrics inspired by the A...