BACKGROUND Crowding in hospital Emergency Departments (EDs) is a problem in several countries. We evaluated the number and characteristics of patients who make repeated visits to the EDs in Naples, Italy. METHODS All patients (> or = 16 years) who presented to the EDs of three randomly selected non-academic acute care public hospitals, within randomly selected week periods, were studied. The ...

Essential hypertension is the most common diagnosis in US primary care settings for middle-aged persons and seniors. Yet, data on hypertension screening, treatment, and control in such settings are limited. We analyzed National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey data to examine the rates of and factors associated with hypertension screening, treatment, and control during US office visits in 2003 an...

We report our system and experiments at the 2011 Medical Record Track. Our goal is to return most relevant visits according to a query. In particular, we start with an axiomatic retrieval, and combine it with an aspect based term proximity strategy to improve the retrieval performance. We also propose a “disease-­diversity” strategy based on the assumption that most of documents only contain in...

The purpose of this preliminary study is to develop an operational definition of the closure phase of the medical visit. A listening group developed a definition of closure by consensus based on audiotaped data from 22 office visits to physicians. The group noted new problems in closure not previously raised. Closure was defined as the final phase of the medical visit in which the doctor and pa...

A methodology has been developed to determine the relative values of surgical procedures and medical office visits on the basis of resource costs. The time taken to perform the service and the complexity of that service are the most critical variables. Inter-specialty differences in the opportunity costs of training and overhead expenses are also considered. Results indicate some important diff...

OBJECTIVE This report describes ambulatory visits for asthma in the United States across three ambulatory care settings. The primary focus is on visits to office-based physicians. METHODS The data sources include the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), a national probability survey of visits to office-based physicians in the United States, and the National Hospital Ambulatory Med...