The cost of prescription medicines has recently been rising faster than other healthcare costs.  This is also true for traditionally inexpensive generic medications that have long served as a fundamental healthcare safety net in the USA.  These changes increasingly present challenges for individuals to obtain common medications.  Owing to rising insurance co-pays, even patients who have prescri...

BACKGROUND To be successful, cost control efforts must target Medicaid Managed Care (MMC) beneficiaries likely to incur high costs. The critical question is how to identify potential high cost beneficiaries with simple, reproducible, transparent, auditable criteria. Our objective in this analysis was to evaluate whether the total burden of comorbidity, assessed by the Charlson comorbidity index...

Background Panel tests are a predetermined group of tests commonly requested together to provide a comprehensive and conclusive diagnosis, for example, liver function test (LFT). South African HIV antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines recommend individual tests for toxicity monitoring over panel tests. In 2008, the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) request form was redesigned to li...

Recruiting primary care physicians can cost a large practice millions of dollars in recruitment expenses and lost revenue. And competition among practices to attract physicians can cause a position to remain unfilled for a year or longer. Thus, the ability to retain physicians is critical to the financial well-being of a practice. Successful implementation of a physician retention plan can help...

Patients and healthcare providers are continually exposed to a healthcare system powered by medical information technologies. One of the first technologies showing promise is electronic health records (EHRs). Basic and advanced EHR systems facilitate access to essential clinical information, such as patient demographic characteristics, patient-physician encounters, laboratory and imaging result...

n engl j med 368;1 nejm.org january 3, 2013 6 requirement substantially burdens the religious beliefs of employers. Two courts have observed that the rule does not require employers to use contraceptives or even to approve of their use. It asks the employer only to make a benefit available, which the employee must then decide whether or not to use. Employers object, however, that they should no...

ICUs are an essential but expensive part of all modern hospitals. With increasingly limited healthcare funding, methods to reduce expenditure without negatively influencing patient outcomes are, therefore, of interest. One possible solution has been the development of 'intermediate care units', which provide more intensive monitoring and patient management with higher nurse:patient ratios than ...

Floods, snow, $5.00 corn, $.50 calves, and a $55 fed cattle market—What is this, a list of reasons not to be in the cattle business? No, just a description of 1996. In addition to these factors, there has been consumer frenzy regarding outbreaks of E. coli and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States and Europe, respectively. All of these represent reasons why cattlemen need ...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a disease management intervention on rehospitalization rates in hospitalized heart failure (HF) patients. METHODS Patients treated with the TEACH-HF intervention that included Teaching and Education, prompt follow-up Appointments, Consultation for support services, and Home follow-up phone calls (TEACH-HF) from January 2010 ...