Patient Dismissal by Primary Care Practices

Profiling Resource Use by Primary-Care Practices: Managed Medicare Implications

Variations in elderly Medicare beneficiaries' health service use are examined using a 100-percent sample of fee-for-service (FFS) claims data from Alabama, Iowa, and Maryland. Provider specialty, group practice type, practice size, and location are found to be significant factors affecting hospital and ambulatory care utilization and cost, after controlling for patient and regional characterist...

Preventive medicine practices by primary care providers in Karachi.

Patient Portal as a Tool for Enhancing Patient Experience and Improving Quality of Care in Primary Care Practices

INTRODUCTION This study assessed whether patient portals influence patients' ability for self-management, improve their perception of health state, improve their experience with primary care practices, and reduce healthcare utilization. METHODS Patients participating in a nurse-led care coordination program received personalized training to use the portal to communicate with the care team. Da...

Improving Prescribing Practices in Primary Care

I n a new paper in PLoS Medicine , Fretheim and colleagues report the results of the Rational Prescribing in Primary Care (RaPP) trial, a cluster-randomised controlled trial of a multicomponent intervention to improve prescribing of antihypertensive and cholesterol-lowering drugs in primary care [1]. In a second paper, the same authors present their economic evaluation of the intervention [2]. ...

Inducing sustainable improvement in depression care in primary care practices.

BACKGROUND Improving primary care depression care is costly and challenging to sustain. The feasibility and potential success ofa modified improvement collaborative model to create sustained improvements in depression care was assessed. METHODS Sixteen practices from the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network and the American College of Physicians Practice-based Resea...