We compared emergency department and ambulatory care syndromic surveillance systems during the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 outbreak in New York City. Emergency departments likely experienced increases in influenza-like-illness significantly earlier than ambulatory care facilities because more patients sought care at emergency departments, differences in case definitions existed, or a combination thereof.

On March 1-2, 2010, a state-of-the-science invitational conference titled "Ambulatory Care Registered Nurse Performance Measurement" was held to focus on measuring quality at the RN provider level in ambulatory care. The conference was devoted to ambulatory care RN performance measurement and quality of health care. The specific emphasis was on formulating a research agenda and developing a str...

More and more ambulatory care organizations are using nursing report cards to monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of nursing care in the ambulatory setting. Nurse staffing levels is usually one of the items included in a nursing report card and the one most scrutinized by ambulatory care administrators. One strategy employed by the nursing leadership at the South Texas Veterans H...

Ambulatory care faces challenges in sustaining a nursing workforce in the future as newly licensed nurses are heavily recruited to inpatient settings and retirements will impact ambulatory care sooner than other areas. Building a diverse team by recruiting nurses of different ages (generations) and skills may result in a more successful and robust organization. Knowledge about generational char...

PURPOSE This article discusses considerations for making ambulatory care pharmacist services at least cost neutral and, ideally, generate a margin that allows for service expansion. SUMMARY The four pillars of business sustainability are leadership, staffing, information technology, and compensation. A key facet of leadership in ambulatory care pharmacy practice is creating and expressing a c...

BACKGROUND Dropout from an outpatient clinic is the loss of a patient to scheduled follow-up. Due to movement of mental health care to the community, adherence to ambulatory care is crucial to maintain stability among individuals with mental disorders. We hypothesized that patients drop out from ambulatory psychiatric care when regardless of the therapist's evaluation, they feel that they have ...

BACKGROUND Compared with the traditional ways of gaining health-related information from newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the Internet is inexpensive, accessible, and conveys diverse opinions. Several studies on how increasing Internet use affected outpatient clinic visits were inconclusive. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to examine the role of Internet use on ambulato...

This quantitative study aimed to get to know the reasons that made aged people seek care at a basic health care outpatient clinic in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The data was collected in the patient files of 401 aged people attended by the health team. Initial reading of these records evidenced 4634 reasons that, after qualitative analysis, were grouped under complaints and requests fo...

BACKGROUND Inappropriate medication use in elderly patients has been linked to a large share of adverse drug reactions and to excess health care utilization. METHODS Trends in the prevalence of potentially inappropriate drug prescribing at ambulatory care visits by elderly persons from 1995 to 2000 were examined with data from office-based physicians in the National Ambulatory Medical Care Su...

BACKGROUND When copayments for ambulatory care are increased, elderly patients may forgo important outpatient care, leading to increased use of hospital care. METHODS We compared longitudinal changes in the use of outpatient and inpatient care between enrollees in Medicare plans that increased copayments for ambulatory care and enrollees in matched control plans--similar plans that made no ch...