mcdonough’s perspective on healthcare reform in the us provides a clear, coherent analysis of the mix of access and delivery reforms in the affordable care act (aca) aka obamacare. as noted by mcdonough, this major reform bill is designed to expand access for health coverage that includes both prevention and treatment benefits among uninsured americans. additionally, this legislation includes s...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires states to establish healthcare insurance exchanges by 2014 to facilitate the purchase of qualified health plans. States are required to establish exchanges for small businesses and individuals. A federally operated exchange will be established, and states failing to participate in any other exchanges will be mandated to join the fe...

Since the 1950s, China has had a very wide coverage of healthcare service at the local level. In urban areas, the employment-based healthcare-insurance schemes (Government Insurance Scheme and Labour Insurance Scheme) worked hand in hand with the full employment policy of the Government, which guaranteed basic care for almost every urban resident. However, since the economic reforms of the earl...

The following article is a recent bibliographic review of supplementary healthcare policies in Brazil and EU. The main focus is analyzing healthcare policies for the private sector in Brazil, within the context of Brazil’s Unified National Health System (SUS), with the profile of the private sector in European Union countries, which have long had public systems integrated with social security. ...

The claims data of the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) is an important source of information for healthcare service research. The claims data of HIRA is collected when healthcare service providers submit a claim to HIRA to be reimbursed for a service that they provided to patients. To improve the accessibility of healthcare service researchers to claims data of HIRA, HIRA ...

Despite many perceived benefits from accessing and exchanging patient information across healthcare providers (HCPs), the adoption of healthcare information exchanges (HIEs) has been slow. Numerous efforts related to the implementation of HIEs are typically focused on consolidation of data within a region or a network, and have resulted in a growing number of HIEs implemented at different level...

The way forward involves not only preventing negligence and fraud, but also facilitating therapeutic exchanges between various healthcare providers and their patients.

Based on our interactions with the key personnel of three different healthcare information exchange (HIE) providers in Texas, we study a setting where the HIE provider can offer value-added services in addition to base HIE connectivity. We find that costs related to maintaining the HIE and offering value-added services affect whether the HIE network will be established or not, whereas heterogen...

Problem statement: Most of healthcare data exchanges are textual, poorly structured and often not accessible by clinical professionals. Otherwise, the variety of medical applications and medical standards makes difficult sharing and communicating healthcare data in a highly heterogeneous environment. Approach: XML and related standards (XML schema, XSL) provided an infrastructure that might cha...

This paper describes a study of Bullet Rounds in General Internal Medicine at an urban teaching hospital in Toronto, Canada. Bullet Rounds are multidisciplinary meetings of healthcare professionals involved in patient care. The goal of the study was to examine the processes of the meetings to understand the level of collaboration and knowledge exchange that takes place, the issues faced by such...