BACKGROUND Alcohol-related violence in and in the vicinity of licensed premises continues to place a considerable burden on the United Kingdom's (UK) health services. Robust interventions targeted at licensed premises are therefore required to reduce the costs of alcohol-related harm. Previous evaluations of interventions in licensed premises have a number of methodological limitations and none...

Collaborative care between general practitioners and mental health specialists has been shown to improve the care of patients with depression in primary care and may be an important development in mental health services. Outcome measures are becoming increasingly important in psychiatry as we attempt to alter and improve the structure of services. In this article we propose a series of outcome ...

INTRODUCTION The Primary Care Information Project (PCIP) of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been assisting providers to implement health information technology such as electronic health records (EHRs) since its founding in 2005. Currently, all practices affiliated with PCIP are offered technical support services in order to improve the use of the EHR. We studied th...

BACKGROUND Mobile phone apps are increasingly used to deliver health interventions, which provide the opportunity to present health information via different communication modes. However, scientific evidence regarding the effects of such health apps is scarce. OBJECTIVE In a randomized controlled trial, we tested the efficacy of a 6-month intervention delivered via a mobile phone app that com...

BACKGROUND Quality-of-life (QOL) assessment and improvement have recently been recognized as important components of health care, in general, and mental health care, in particular. Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have a significantly diminished QOL. METHODS Using a Medline search of relevant keywords for the past 26 years, this article reviews the empirical literature to provide...

The Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) includes provisions for identifying standardized pediatric care quality measures. These 24 "CHIPRA measures" were designed to be evaluated by using claims data from health insurance plan populations. Such data have limited ability to evaluate population health, especially among uninsured people. The rapid expansion of ...

PURPOSE To investigate the set up and operation of a Managed Clinical Network for cardiac services and assess its impact on patient care. METHODS This single case study used process evaluation with observational before and after comparison of indicators of quality of care and costs. The study was conducted in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland and used a three-level framework. Process evaluation...

BACKGROUND Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are increasingly used to establish the value of health care. In order to reflect value, PROMs should measure outcomes that matter to patients. However, patients are not always involved in the development of PROMs. This study therefore aimed to investigate whether PROMs, which were developed without patient involvement, are relevant to patient...

OBJECTIVE To study the extent to which community health information exchanges (HIEs) deliver and measure return on investment (ROI) and improvements in the quality of care. MATERIALS AND METHODS We surveyed operational HIEs for their characteristics, information domains, impact on quality of care, and ROI. RESULTS A 60 percent response rate was achieved. Two-thirds of respondents agreed tha...