OBJECTIVE This report presents numbers and percents of home health and hospice care agencies, their current patients, and their discharges. Agency characteristics include type of ownership, region, certification, location, and affiliation. Patient and discharge characteristics include age, sex, race, marital status admission diagnoses, and procedures. METHODS The data used for this report are...

BACKGROUND The current landscape of a rapidly aging population accompanied by multiple chronic conditions presents numerous challenges to optimally support the complex needs of this group. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies have shown promise in supporting older persons to manage chronic conditions; however, there remains a dearth of evidence-informed guidance to develop such innovations. O...

As the pressure to reduce the length of hospital stays increases, use of home care services is increasing1. As a result of health care reforms in the province of Ontario beginning in the mid-1990s, the setting for some health care services has shifted from the hospital to the home. Benefits of a home care system include reduced pressure on acute care facilities through expeditious discharge of ...

OBJECTIVES To investigate mothers' perspectives on the quality of postpartum care services in central Shanghai, China. DESIGN Semi-structured interviews. SETTING Two maternal and child health posts in two subdistricts in LW District, Central Shanghai, China. STUDY PARTICIPANTS Fifty postpartum mothers who attended the maternal and child health posts in the two subdistricts in LW District,...

CONTEXT The receipt of health care in a medical home is increasingly touted as a fundamental basis for improved care for persons with chronic conditions, yet the evidence for this claim has not been systematically assessed. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to determine the evidence for the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau recommendation that children with special health care needs receive ongoi...

BACKGROUND This article considers how health services access and equity documents represent the problem of access to health services and what the effects of that representation might be for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities. We conducted a critical discourse analysis on selected access and equity documents using a gender-based diversity framework as determined by two obj...

Family physicians have always known the value of a medical home, even when there was no term to describe it. Now, 60 years after the AAFP was founded, others are recognizing that medical homes may be the key to getting better value from the U.S. health care system. In recent months, a wide range of stakeholders including legislators, large employers, patient groups and organized medicine have b...

Managed care is more than simply a definition--it is often described as a "way of life, .... a religion." Continuing the analogy, to understand and participate, it is necessary to be a "believer." It is easy then to articulate what managed care is and what it is not. It is the conscientious attempt "to effect a balance in the utilization of health care resources, cost containment and quality en...

Background: Providing community-based mental health services is crucial and is an agreed plan between the Iranian Mental Health Office and the Regional Committee for the Eastern Mediterranean (affiliated with WHO). The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of home-visit clinical case-management services on the hospitalization rate and other clinical outcomes in patients with seve...