The need for behavioral healthcare for the poor and indigent is well documented in rural North Carolina, and integrated behavioral healthcare--that is, mental health screening and treatment offered as part of primary care services--has proven a very effective and efficient method to improve patients' health. In 2000, the Buncombe County Health Center (BCHC) began a grant-funded program treating...

Healthcare providers are often evaluated by studying variability in their indicators. However, the usefulness of this analysis may be limited if we do not distinguish the variability attributable to health professionals and organizations from that associated with their patients.Our objectives are to describe the main process and outcome indicators of primary healthcare services, analyzing the c...

OBJECTIVE To develop a primary care assessment tool in Tibetan area and assess the primary care quality among different healthcare settings. METHODS Primary care assessment tool-Tibetan version (PCAT-T) was developed to measure seven primary care domains. Data from a cross-sectional survey of 1386 patients was used to conduct validity and reliability analysis of PCAT-T. Analysis of variance w...

We use the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to estimate the direct medical costs of diabetes. Separate estimates of the cost of diabetes are developed from an attributable risk procedure and a two-part regression model. Costs include expenditures to treat diabetes, chronic complications of the disease, and co-morbidities requiring additional health care resources because the person is diabetic....

a Department of General Practice, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen , The Netherlands, b Department of General Practice , University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen , The Netherlands, c Radboud University Medical Center, Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, IQ Healthcare, Nijmegen , The Netherlands, d NIVEL, Netherlands Instit...

1 Cardeza Foundation and Department of Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University, 1015 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA 2Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 400 North Broadway, Baltimore, MD 21267, USA 3Department of Pediatrics, Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA 30322, ...

Smartphones have been widely used recently to monitor heart rate and activity, since they have the necessary processing power, non-invasive and cost-effective sensors, and wireless communication capabilities. Consequently, healthcare applications (apps) using smartphone-based sensors have been highlighted for non-invasive physiological monitoring. In addition, several healthcare apps have recei...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of an institutional hand hygiene accountability program on healthcare personnel hand hygiene adherence. DESIGN Time-series design with correlation analysis. SETTING Tertiary care academic medical center, including outpatient clinics and procedural areas. PARTICIPANTS Medical center healthcare personnel. METHODS A comprehensive hand hygiene initiative was...