An empowering clinical nurse advancement system can facilitate institutional behaviors that embrace all of AACN's healthy work environment standards and thus serve as a building block for developing a flourishing health care environment. The results generate positive outcomes that are evident to health care professionals, patients, patients' families, and health care organizations. Patients ben...

Health care management within the USA operations of the Ford Motor Company is a substantial and critical enterprise. The company provides health care coverage for a population of 636,000 active employees, retirees and their dependents at a cost of US$1.5 billion annually. The company realizes that effective management of health care resources requires continuous improvement in the services for ...

OBJECTIVE To determine who chooses a Consumer-Driven Health Plan (CDHP) in a multiplan, multiproduct setting, and, specifically, whether the CDHP attracts the sicker employees in a company's risk pool. STUDY DESIGN We estimated a health plan choice equation for employees of the University of Minnesota, who had a choice in 2002 of a CDHP and three other health plans--a traditional health maint...

The growth of managed care as the predominant mode of health insurance in the U.S. has inspired innumerable studies of its effects on health service delivery. One of the most striking trends has been an increase in the proportion of physicians who are employees, with no ownership stake in their medical practices. Overall, 24 percent of physicians were employees in 1985, but by 1994 this figure ...

background: improving patient safety is a priority of the international common. patient safety is a critical component to the quality of health care. the aim of this study was to assess patient safety culture among employees of health care providers, hospitals in tehran. methods: the survey was a cross-sectional study was done in 2010. data were collected from all the staff groups in hospitals ...

Due to the present evidence for reproductive toxicity of nitrous oxide (N(2)O) among female personnel in health care, exposure of 17 female workers employed in two post-anesthesia care units was evaluated. Geometric mean concentration of nitrous oxide for six recovery room personnel was 3.1 ppm versus 1.17 ppm for eleven employees in surgical nursing units. The longest time needed to reach zero...

This study assessed the cost-effectiveness of a worksite clinic. In-house clinic operational costs were compared to off-site (i.e., community) health care costs during a 1-year time frame. Community cost norms were extracted from statewide databases and adjusted to local costs. Lost productivity costs were based on survey feedback from current clinic users, which included their estimated time a...

The Affordable Care Act changed the regulations governing small firms’ health insurance premiums. However, small businesses can avoid many of the new regulations by self-insuring or maintaining grandfathered plans. If small firms with healthy and lower-cost enrollees avoid the regulations, premiums for coverage sold through insurance exchanges could be unaffordable. In this analysis we used the...

background: primary health care is the major infrastructure of health care systems. it is clear that making and improving primary health care information systems would not be possible without awareness of their condition. therefore, this comparative study was conducted in order to determine the situation of primary health care information systems in health centers of tehran, iran. methods: this...

Emergency departments (EDs) face problems with crowding, delays, cost containment, and patient safety. To address these and other problems, EDs increasingly implement an approach called Lean thinking. This study critically reviewed 18 articles describing the implementation of Lean in 15 EDs in the United States, Australia, and Canada. An analytic framework based on human factors engineering and...