PURPOSE This article discusses considerations for making ambulatory care pharmacist services at least cost neutral and, ideally, generate a margin that allows for service expansion. SUMMARY The four pillars of business sustainability are leadership, staffing, information technology, and compensation. A key facet of leadership in ambulatory care pharmacy practice is creating and expressing a c...

BACKGROUND Dropout from an outpatient clinic is the loss of a patient to scheduled follow-up. Due to movement of mental health care to the community, adherence to ambulatory care is crucial to maintain stability among individuals with mental disorders. We hypothesized that patients drop out from ambulatory psychiatric care when regardless of the therapist's evaluation, they feel that they have ...

BACKGROUND Compared with the traditional ways of gaining health-related information from newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the Internet is inexpensive, accessible, and conveys diverse opinions. Several studies on how increasing Internet use affected outpatient clinic visits were inconclusive. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to examine the role of Internet use on ambulato...

This quantitative study aimed to get to know the reasons that made aged people seek care at a basic health care outpatient clinic in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The data was collected in the patient files of 401 aged people attended by the health team. Initial reading of these records evidenced 4634 reasons that, after qualitative analysis, were grouped under complaints and requests fo...

BACKGROUND Inappropriate medication use in elderly patients has been linked to a large share of adverse drug reactions and to excess health care utilization. METHODS Trends in the prevalence of potentially inappropriate drug prescribing at ambulatory care visits by elderly persons from 1995 to 2000 were examined with data from office-based physicians in the National Ambulatory Medical Care Su...

BACKGROUND When copayments for ambulatory care are increased, elderly patients may forgo important outpatient care, leading to increased use of hospital care. METHODS We compared longitudinal changes in the use of outpatient and inpatient care between enrollees in Medicare plans that increased copayments for ambulatory care and enrollees in matched control plans--similar plans that made no ch...

Every year, 1.2 billion visits are made in ambulatory care settings, accounting for approximately one third of health care spending in the United States.1,2 Although the vast majority of these visits take place in office-based clinics and emergency departments, an increasing number of patients are seeking care in nontraditional sites such as retail clinics and urgent care centers. Retail clinic...

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...