2/9/06 2:08:34 PM Health savings accounts, or HSAs, are a new health insurance option that became available in 2004. HSAs couple a tax-preferred savings account (the HSA) with high-deductible health insurance. Enrollees or their employers, or both, make tax-free contributions to the HSA. Enrollees use the funds in their HSAs to purchase medical care until they reach their deductibles. At that p...

The cardiovascular surgeon, Prof. Dr. Domingo Marcolino Braile, has taken over the position of Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery (BJCVS)/ Revista Brasileira de Cirurgia Cardiovascular (RBCCV), in April 2002, along with the Board of Directors elected during the 29th Brazilian Society of Cardiovascular Surgery Congress (BSCVS) held in Natal, RN. Some challenges have to be ...

We tested a low-cost, multifaceted intervention program comprising formulary restriction measures, continued comprehensive education, and guidelines to improve in-hospital use of antibiotics and related costs. In a short-term analysis, total antibiotic consumption per patient admitted, which was expressed as defined daily doses (DDD), decreased by 36% (P < .001), and intravenous DDDs decreased ...

BACKGROUND Shortened treatment regimens for tuberculosis are under development to improve treatment outcomes and reduce costs. We estimated potential savings from a societal perspective in Brazil following the introduction of a hypothetical four-month regimen for tuberculosis treatment. METHODS Data were gathered in ten randomly selected health facilities in Rio de Janeiro. Health service cos...

Prevention of unhealthy lifestyles has sometimes been promoted as simultaneously reducing costs and improving public health but this will unlikely prove to be true. Additional medical costs in life years gained due to treatment of unrelated diseases may offset possible savings in related diseases, but are often ignored both in health promotion policies and in economic evaluations of life-prolon...

BACKGROUND This report updates 2001 estimates of disease burden prevented and cost effectiveness of tobacco-use screening and brief intervention relative to that of other clinical preventive services. It also addresses repeated counseling because the literature has focused on single episodes of treatment, while in reality that is neither desirable nor likely. METHODS Literature searches led t...

The impact of a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) in reducing total cost of care remains a subject of debate, particularly among the non-elderly adult population. This study examines a 6-year experience of a large integrated regional health care delivery system in the US implementing PCMH among its commercially insured population. A regional health plan's claims data from 2008 through 2013 a...

Several word prediction methods to help the communication of people with disabilities can be found in the recent literature. Most Of them have been developed for English or other non-inflected languages. While most of these methods can be modified to be used in other languages with similar structures, they may not be directly adapted to inflected languages. In this paper some word prediction te...

BACKGROUND Uruguay is located at the southern border of Aedes aegypti distribution on the South American sub-continent. The reported dengue cases in the country are all imported from surrounding countries. One of the cities at higher risk of local dengue transmission is Salto, a border city with heavy traffic from dengue endemic areas. METHODS We completed an intervention study using a cluste...