In quantifying the impact of insurance on health care demand, most quasiexperimental studies focus on mean spending and consumption, which, considering the highly-skewed shapes of spending and consumption, potentially hides important information about how insurance is related to health care demand. This paper, by contrast, examines the entire distribution of health care demand. To address insur...

This work presents the results obtained after using a simulation model for estimating the maximum possible demand increment in an emergency room of a private hospital in Chile. To achieve this objective the first step was to create a simulation model of the system under study. This model was used to create a curve for predicting the behavior of the variable patient’s time in system and estimate...

In this paper we describe an investigation into the prediction of emergency bed demand bed demand due to non-scheduled admissions within a NHS hospital in South London, U.K. A hybrid methodology, incorporating a neural network and an ARIMA model was used to predict a time series of bed demand. A thorough statistical analysis of the data set was performed as a preliminary phase of the research f...

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Containment Council (PHC4) is an independent state agency responsible for addressing the problem of escalating health costs, ensuring the quality of health care, and increasing access to health care for all citizens regardless of ability to pay. Much of the data used in this analysis was from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4). PHC4 ...

In the past year, stories of Emergency Department (ED) crowding and ambulance diversion have entered Massachusetts headlines with increasing frequency. Hospitals throughout the state now report record numbers of hours on " diversion status, " unable to accept new ambulance arrivals because they are overwhelmed. When emergency responsiveness is threatened, public confidence in the entire health ...

The demand for intensive care has increased relentlessly over the past 30 years. It is now regarded as a necessity rather than a luxury. The provision of intensive care has lagged behind that demand. Thus, patients who are judged to need intensive care when a bed is unavailable are increasingly transferred to another hospital for such care. The present commentary discusses intensive care transf...

BACKGROUND All women in the Netherlands should have equal access to obstetric care. However, utilization of care is shaped by demand and supply factors. Demand is increased in high risk groups (non-Western women, low socio-economic status (SES)), and supply is influenced by availability of hospital facilities (hospital density). To explore the dynamics of obstetric care utilization we investiga...

Background. We describe the process and challenges of delivering integrative medicine (IM) at a large, acute care hospital, from the perspectives of IM practitioners. To date, minimal literature that addresses the delivery of IM care in an inpatient setting from this perspective exists. Methods. Fifteen IM practitioners were interviewed about their experience delivering IM services at Abbott No...

Hospital emergency services are closely connected to demographic issues and population changes. The methodology presented here helps to assess the effects of the forecasted demand changes on the nextyear emergency unit workloads. The objective of the study is to estimate the expected volume of emergency hospital services, as measured by the number and costs of medical procedures provided to pat...