Intensive outpatient care is rapidly becoming the primary mode of care for selected patients undergoing high-dose chemotherapy with autologous peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplantation. Although the traditional inpatient model of care may still be necessary for high-risk patients, published data suggest that outpatient care is safe and feasible during or after administration of high-dos...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the short-term association between outdoor air pollution and outpatient visits for acute bronchitis, which is a rare subject of research in the mainland of China. METHODS A time-series analysis was conducted to examine the association of outdoor air pollutants with hospital outpatient visits in Shanghai by using two-year daily data (2010-2011). RESULTS Outdoor air p...

Large regional health care systems face challenges in planning physician schedules and appointments to achieve patient-access goals and efficient use of resources. We describe the development of a planning and forecasting system that predicts outpatient visits (OPVs) for 23 primary and specialty care clinics at a large medical center in Rochester, Minn. We develop and compare univariate, multiv...

Rewards have important influences on the motor planning of primates and the firing of neurons coding visual information and action. When eye movements to a target are differentially rewarded across locations, primates execute saccades towards the possible target location with the highest expected value, a product of sensory evidence and potentially earned reward (saccade to maximum expected val...

PURPOSE The role of pharmacists in the emergency department (ED) of an acute care hospital is described. SUMMARY The ED staff at Carolinas Medical Center-NorthEast care for approximately 80,000 patients per year, with approximately 215 patient visits per day. In July 2007, clinical pharmacy services were implemented in the ED, and four dedicated ED pharmacists were hired with the primary resp...

For more than three decades, Congress has struggled with potential financial conflicts of interest when physicians share in financial gain from nonprofessional services. This study asks the question: Are physicians who are leading referrers to physician-owned ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) more likely to send Medicaid patients to hospital outpatient clinics than other patients? The compariso...

Seventy asthmatic patients newly referred to a hospital outpatient clinic have been studied. In one-third of the patients the diagnosis of asthma had not been considered. Eight patients presented with an FEV1 of one litre or less. Acute severe asthma is commonly believed to precede death from asthma, but patients with more chronic symptoms may have equally severe airways obstruction without app...

OBJECTIVE With a quasi-experimental design, this study aims to assess whether the Zero-markup Policy for Essential Drugs (ZPED) reduces the medical expense for patients at county hospitals, the major healthcare provider in rural China. METHODS Data from Ningshan county hospital and Zhenping county hospital, China, include 2014 outpatient records and 9239 inpatient records. Quantitative method...