Little is known about the trends in health care spending for the 156 million Americans who are younger than age sixty-five and enrolled in employer-sponsored health insurance. Using a new source of health insurance claims data, we estimated per capita spending, utilization, and prices for this population between 2007 and 2011. During this period per capita spending on employer-sponsored insuran...

BACKGROUND China had implemented policies to limit antimicrobials prescription since 2004; we conducted this study to reflect the effect of these national policies by analyzing antimicrobial prescription trends of medical insurance in patients from 2003 to 2014 in Changsha city, China. METHODS The participants were inpatients of the medical insurance of urban workers (UEBMI). Data were extrac...

PURPOSE This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and management status of urologic disease in geriatric hospitals in Korea. MATERIALS AND METHODS We conducted population-based analyzed using cohort established by the National Health Insurance Service of Korea, which contains the medical insurance data of 1 million people from 2002 to 2013. The prevalence, prescription rate, and complica...

BACKGROUND Only 13% of HIV-positive young adults are estimated to be virally suppressed and, even among those receiving medical care, HIV-positive young adults are less likely than older adults to take antiretroviral therapy (ART), be adherent, and be virally suppressed. We sought to examine trends in treatment and health outcomes from 2009 to 2013 among HIV-positive young adults (aged 18-24 ye...

Background and objectives: Approaches to translating medical error information into effective interventions have not been well described. The Applied Strategies for Improving Patient Safety (ASIPS) Collaborative developed a mixed-methods approach to analyze medical errors to (1) develop an initial conceptual framework for depicting specific clinical processes at risk for error, (2) validate the...

OBJECTIVE To assess guideline adherence of co-prescribing NSAID and gastroprotective medications for elders in general practice over time, and investigate its potential association with the electronic medical record (EMR) system brand used. METHODS We included patients 65 years and older who received NSAIDs between 2005 and 2010. Prescription data were extracted from EMR systems of GP practic...

Catherine A. Heyneman is the director of the Idaho Drug Information Service and an assistant professor of Pharmacy Practice at the Idaho State University College of Pharmacy, Pocatello, Idaho. Medicinal herbs have been used since the beginning of recorded time. Approximately one quarter of prescription drugs on the market today are still derived from plant products (eg, digoxin from the foxglov...

A cross-sectional study was conducted to examine the use of prescription drugs among elderly patients (> or = 60 years old) admitted to medical wards in Hospital Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A total of 204 elderly (101 men and 103 women) were interviewed. Eighty two percent of the elderly were taking at least one prescription drug, with 39.2% taking > or = 5 drugs. Prescription drugs commonly used w...

CONTEXT Proliferation of the use of psychopharmacologic drugs for the treatment of individuals with attention and behavior disorders has promoted discussion of the illicit use of such drugs to enhance academic performance. Previous research has focused on the use of such drugs by undergraduate students; however, inquiry into the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants by medical students is w...

Rational prescribing increases the quality of health care and patient outcomes. In this study, the quality of drug prescription in specialist physicians in Isfahan province of Iran was assessed for evaluating the rational use of drugs and improving the therapeutic outcomes.This retrospective survey was conducted on a total of 7999530 prescriptions from all general and specialist physicians. The...