Implementing large strategic IS in the UK health sector has recently become the subject of much debate, as hospitals have undergone wide-reaching government-led institutional reforms involving the introduction of IT. Many of the developments have followed the patterns in the U.S. One such example is that of Case Mix, introduced strategically as part of the Resource Management Initiative and aim...

OBJECTIVES To test the extent to which two existing ambulatory case mix measures (Ambulatory Visit Groups and Ambulatory Patient Groups) and other variables can explain resource use variations in ophthalmic outpatient visits. DESIGN Three week prospective study of three consultant outpatient clinics. SETTING One ophthalmic hospital (Sunderland Eye Infirmary, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear) and t...

DJ mixes and radio show recordings constitute an important and underexploited music and data source. In this paper we try to approach the problem of separation of a continuous DJ mix into single tracks or timestamping a mix. Sharing some aspects with the task of structural segmentation, this problem has a number of distinctive features that make difficulties for structural segmentation algorith...

Introduction:The prevalence of atopic diseases has increased in recent decades dramatically. The most common aeroallergens in Northeastern Iran have not been fully defined. Define the most common aeroallergens in allergic patients based on the skin prick test (SPT) was aimed in this investigation.Materials and Methods:This cross-sectional study enrolled 1,006 allergic patients (aged 1–86 years)...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE We sought to evaluate a system for monitoring the quality of hospital-based stroke services that uses routinely collected case fatality data, adjusted for case mix, as well as simple measures of the process of stroke care. METHODS We compared the process of care and case fatality after stroke between 5 Scottish hospitals (A through E) during 1995-1997. We retrospectivel...

A review of reforms in the financing of hospital services in eight European countries and Australia reveals a commitment to a common objective of relating resource use to hospital workload by means of a standardized case-mix framework in the pursuit of greater efficiency. While this objective is also shared with the U.S. prospective payment system (PPS), it is noteworthy that the majority of co...

Three critical issues in determining the usefulness of a patient classification in hospital and physician payment, hospital management, and utilization monitoring include: 1) the clinical relevance of the categorization, 2) the extent to which severity of illness distinctions are incorporated, and 3) the identification of comorbidity. Each of these issues has been addressed in the design of pat...

The Medicare hospice benefit prospectively reimburses hospices based on the inpatient status of the patient, whether or not the patient is at home, and whether the patient is receiving round-the-clock nursing. Using national Hospice Study data, two case-mix adjusters based on patient functioning and living arrangement were found to be significantly related to per diem cost. These were tested by...

Case mix and charges for chemotherapy treatment were examined by an analysis of the inpatient discharges for DRG 410 (chemotherapy) from eight teaching hospitals and of outpatient visits from two teaching hospitals. Discharges for ovarian cancer were the most common and the least expensive, costing $1,600 or half as much as the most costly, less common conditions (leukemia and testicle cancer)....