OBJECTIVE To identify and compare perceptions of health care service delivery held by young people with chronic illness and their parents. METHODS A convenience sample of young people with chronic illness and their parents were invited to complete a confidential self-report survey. The adolescents were aged 13-18 years inclusive and attended a specialist medical clinic. RESULTS Participants...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) establishes a new category of health care provider—the accountable care organization (ACO)—within the Medicare program, with rules for provider participation and principles for sharing in the savings generated by this form of coordinated health care delivery. In this second blog post in a series on health care financing, we address th...

• Objective: To assess the extent to which the experiences of older patients vary according to type of primary care provider (ie, physician assistant [PA], nurse practitioner [NP], or physician). • Design: National, cross-sectional survey. • Participants: Medicare beneficiaries completing the 2000 and 2001 Medicare fee-for-service Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Survey who identified a prim...

Health care costs incurred prior to the appropriate patient-provider transaction (i.e., transaction costs of access to health care) are potential barriers to accessing health care in low- and middle-income countries. This paper explores these transaction costs and their implications for health system governance through a cross-sectional survey of adult patients who received their first diagnosi...

As preferred provider organizations (PPOs) become the dominant model of managed health care in the private sector, policymakers have increasingly viewed PPOs as an attractive option for Medicare. In part to understand how PPOs might operate under the Medicare Program, CMS launched the Medicare PPO demonstration in January 2003. In this article, we examine how PPOs have operated so far under the...

LUCIANO BARESI Politecnico di Milano ROBERTO CASCELLA Università Degli Studi di Trento PETER DEUSSEN Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems ANTONIO DI FERDINANDO AND RICARDO LENT Imperial College London SANDRA HASELOFF AND NERMIN BRGULJA Universität Kassel ANTONIO MANZALINI AND CORRADO MOISO Telecom Italia FABRICE SAFFRE British Telecommunications and FRANCO ZAMBONELLI Università d...

OBJECTIVE To determine the health care seeking behavior of TB patients in seeking care and health care providers for delivering care. DESIGN Cross sectional descriptive survey. The interviewers administered a standardized open-ended questionnaire after training and pre-testing. SETTING Federal Government TB Center, Rawalpindi. (specialized TB clinic). SUBJECT One hundred and sixty newly r...

This paper examines factors influencing a patient's choice of provider for outpatient health care services in Jordan. Factors including demographic, socioeconomic, insurance status, quality of care, household size and cost of health care were studied using a multinomial logit model applied to a sample of 1031 outpatients from the Jordan heathcare utilization and expenditure survey, 2000. The pa...

BACKGROUND Pneumococcal disease caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae has a high morbidity rate in elderly individuals aged 65 or older. Previous studies have demonstrated that low vaccination rates with the 23valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (pneumovax) are due to a lack of awareness and knowledge about the vaccine in the general population. This study measured the association between t...