• Objective: To assess the extent to which the experiences of older patients vary according to type of primary care provider (ie, physician assistant [PA], nurse practitioner [NP], or physician). • Design: National, cross-sectional survey. • Participants: Medicare beneficiaries completing the 2000 and 2001 Medicare fee-for-service Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Survey who identified a prim...

Federal policies and state legislation in the United States encourage the use of physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) in primary care, although the nature of their work has not been fully analyzed. This article analyzes primary care physician office-encounter data from the 1995-1999 National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys. About one-quarter of primary care office-based phys...

BACKGROUND A practice intervention must have its basis in an understanding of the physician and practice to secure its benefit and relevancy. We used a formative process to characterize primary care physician attitudes, needs, and practice obstacles regarding primary prevention. The characterization will provide the conceptual framework for the development of a practice tool to facilitate routi...

INTRODUCTION Physician demand is challenging to quantify. The authors used three different methodologies to assess physician demand in an area with minimal medical migration. METHODS The researchers calculated population based estimates of physician demand using the average number of physicians per population across the U.S. as a benchmark. This was compared to focus group results and analysi...

OBJECTIVE Direct physician order entry (POE) offers many potential benefits, but evidence suggests that POE requires substantially more time than traditional paper-based ordering methods. The Medical Gopher is a well-accepted system for direct POE that has been in use for more than 15 years. The authors hypothesized that physicians using the Gopher would not spend any more time writing orders t...