OBJECTIVE Involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC), also referred to as community treatment orders or assisted outpatient treatment, is a legal intervention intended to improve treatment adherence among persons with serious mental illness. This paper reviews the empirical literature on the procedure's effectiveness. METHODS We identified and reviewed all English-language studies of OPC and rel...

BACKGROUND The measurement of consumer satisfaction is an essential part of the assessment of health care services in terms of service quality and health care system responsiveness. Studies across Europe have described various strategies health care users employ to secure services with good quality and quick access. In Central and Eastern European countries, such strategies also include informa...

Effective in 2000, Medicare's Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) sets pre-determined reimbursement rates for hospital outpatient services, replacing the prior cost-based methods of reimbursement. Using Florida outpatient discharge data, we study the effect of OPPS on hospital outpatient volume. We find that on average Medicare rate cuts either decreased or had no significant effect on...

PURPOSE To determine whether an appropriately designed computerized order entry system for radiology can be clinically accepted and influence ordering practices. MATERIALS AND METHODS An intranet-based outpatient ordering and scheduling system was designed and implemented beginning in 2001. Indications used to request imaging have been standardized and keystrokes minimized by using menus. The...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To compare the cost of contemporary outpatient and historical inpatient management of proximal lower limb deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in adults. DESIGN Prospective, observational study with historical inpatient cases as controls. SETTING Ambulatory thrombosis clinic of a tertiary care teaching center in Canada. PATIENTS Forty-nine inpatients with DVT from a previous study i...

OBJECTIVE Letters from the hospital to the general practitioner are important for maintaining continuity of care. Although doctors feel letters are important, they are often not written on time. To improve the number and timeliness of letters sent from the hospital outpatient department to the general practitioner using an email-based intervention evaluated in a randomized controlled trial. M...

BACKGROUND Postoperative delirium after elective surgery is frequent and potentially serious. We sought to determine whether the use of statin medications was associated with a higher risk of postoperative delirium than other medications that do not alter microvascular autoregulation. METHODS We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of 284 158 consecutive patients in Ontario aged 65 years...

BACKGROUND Given that the quinolones is one of the antibacterial classes most frequently used to treat patients with bacterial infections in the United States, any change in prescribing patterns of quinolones will impact Medicaid medical expenditures. OBJECTIVES This study was undertaken to examine trends in utilization, reimbursement, and prices of quinolone antibacterials for the US Medicai...

BACKGROUND In recent years, an increasing number of countries have introduced outpatient commitment orders (OC), which imply that patients can be subject to compulsory follow-up and treatment while living in the community. However, few studies on how OC is practised have been published. METHOD Retrospective case register study based on medical files of all patients receiving an OC order in 20...

The correlation between the pharmacist time required for counseling patients and the characteristics of the services provided was studied. Data from the Kaiser Permanente/USC Patient Consultation Study were used to examine the relationship between pharmacist time and potential problems, actions to resolve the problems, and disposition of prescriptions. A regression model was estimated with phar...