This paper proposes an entrepreneurial solution to address the continued, unsustainable increases in health care costs that threaten to deny access to health care for millions of Americans. Entrepreneurs will develop systems providing clear financial motivation for consumers to make decisions that minimize health care spending and maximize positive health outcomes. In so doing, health care prov...

With the expiration of patent protection for several biologics looming, the production of highly similar therapeutic agents has begun to emerge on the pharmaceutical market. These alternative drugs are referred to as biosimilars. Many anticipate that the introduction of these agents will result in a reduction in health care costs, which may create a more affordable biopharmaceutical market and ...

Evidence supports that patient medication adherence is suboptimal with patients typically taking less than half of their prescribed doses. Medication nonadherence is associated with poor health outcomes and higher downstream health care costs. Results of studies evaluating pharmacist-led models in a community pharmacy setting and their impact on medication adherence have been mixed. Community p...

235 U (108)/200 U (100-440) was injected. Based on a BoNT-A injection interval of 12 weeks, the annual cost per patient in the UK would be 1,068 GBP for abobotulinumtoxinA, 1,198 GBP for onabotulinumtoxinA and 1,399 GBP for incobotulinumtoxinA. ConClusions: Considering the real life practice of BoNT-A injections and the comparison of treatment groups treated for the same limb segment, this anal...

OBJECTIVES This study examines the wealth holdings of recent widows, how they compare to those of married couple households, and the potential to use this wealth to augment the incomes of widowed women. METHODS Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation are used to investigate the amount and composition of wealth held by four different groups: always married women, about-to-be-w...

BACKGROUND Patient safety is a national and global concern. In the United States, medical errors result in more than 50,000 unnecessary patient deaths annually and contribute to billions of dollars in health care costs. The purpose of this project was to evaluate a standardized bedside handoff process and its influence in a medical-surgical unit. METHOD A quality improvement project was perfo...

National inpatient and ambulatory surgery data were combined to examine changes over time in the location and amount of surgical care. The main pattern was a decline in the rate of inpatient operations that was outweighed by growth in ambulatory operations. However, the rate of inpatient operations did not decrease for patients age 65 years or over, despite the growth in ambulatory surgery. Oth...

BACKGROUND This article compares the burden that medical cost-sharing requirements place on households in the United States and Canada. It estimates the probability that individuals with similar demographic features in the two countries have large medical expenses relative to income. METHOD The study uses 2010 nationally representative household survey data harmonized for cross-national compa...

"Catastrophic" illness has recently been recognized as a major problem of public policy. Diseases may be considered "catastrophic" for policy purposes simply because of their calamitous nature or because of their high treatment costs. Early steps extending protection against catastrophic illness were confined to identifying specific diseases as catastrophic so as to concentrate governmental eff...

During a January 2004 speech at an Arkansas medical center, President Bush remarked, “[W]e’ve got too many darn lawsuits, too many frivolous and junk lawsuits that are affecting people. . . . [W]e need medical liability reform to make sure that medicine is affordable and available. . . . Lawsuits don’t heal patients. That’s a fact.” Despite the fact that medical malpractice reform has been the ...