BACKGROUND Wait times are an important measure of access to various health care sectors and from a patient's perspective include several stages in their care. While mechanisms to improve wait times from specialty care have been developed across Canada, little is known about wait times from primary to specialty care. Our objectives were to calculate the wait times from when a referral is made by...

Primary care is the foundation of the rural U.S. health care system. Thus, the willingness of rural primary care physicians to accept new Medicare patients is critically important to the Medicare program and to rural America's elderly. But universally consistent access to primary care physicians for Medicare beneficiaries may be in jeopardy. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) repo...

The increasing focus on high performance, patient-centered, team-based care calls for a strategy to evaluate cost-effective primary care. The trend toward physician practice consolidation further challenges the primary care health care system. Productivity measures establish provider value and help inform decision making regarding resource allocation in this evolving health care system. In this...

BACKGROUND To examine the agreement between depression symptoms using an assessment tool (PHQ-9), and physician documentation of the same symptoms during a clinic visit, and then to examine how the presence of these symptoms affects depression diagnosis in primary care settings. METHODS Interviewer administered surveys and medical record reviews. A total of 304 participants were recruited fro...

INTRODUCTION Care by Design™ (CBD) (Canada), a model of coordinated team-based primary care, was implemented in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to improve access to and continuity of primary care and to reduce high rates of transfers to emergency departments (EDs). METHODS This was an observational time series before and after the implementation of CBD (Cana...

BACKGROUND Primary care physicians can enhance the health and quality of life of children with autism by providing high-quality and comprehensive primary care. OBJECTIVE To explore physicians' perspectives on primary care for children with autism. METHODS National mail and e-mail surveys were sent to a random sample of 2325 general pediatricians and 775 family physicians from April 2007 to ...

CONTEXT Data collected in 1998 on primary physician performance, including Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures, were the basis of reports distributed quarterly to 194 primary care physicians at 25 medical centers in Group Health Cooperative. Here, we summarize results of research designed to assess reliability of measures of physician performance and to identify pract...

PURPOSE To examine the effects of patient, physician, and health care system characteristics on primary care physicians' (PCPs') specialty referral decision making. METHODS Physicians (n=142) and their practices (n=83) located in 30 states completed background questionnaires and collected survey data for all patient visits (n=34,069) made during 15 consecutive workdays. The authors modeled th...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES : The role of the professional case manager is changing rapidly. Health reform has called upon the industry to ensure that care is delivered in an efficient, effective, and high-quality and low cost manner. As a means to achieve this objective, health plans and health systems are moving the care manager out of a centralized location within their organizations to "embedding" t...