The challenge to provide a nation-wide healthcare service continues unabated in the 21st century as politicians and managers drive through policies to modernize the UK National Health Service (NHS). Established around 60 years ago to offer free healthcare at the point of delivery to all citizens, the NHS now accounts for the largest portion of public expenditure after social security, with tota...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to evaluate whether ostomy industry patent activity (PA) is associated with patient outcomes and healthcare costs. METHODS Two groups of ostomy pouch users based on manufacturer PA (low or high) were compared in terms of ostomy-related wear patterns, adverse events, and healthcare expenditure. Using Swedish registry data, all patients with newly formed sto...

Online physician reviews are a massive and potentially rich source of information capturing patient sentiment regarding healthcare. We analyze a corpus comprising nearly 60,000 such reviews with a state-of-the-art probabilistic model of text. We describe a probabilistic generative model that captures latent sentiment across aspects of care (eg, interpersonal manner). We target specific aspects ...

This study explores the characteristics of Medicare-only beneficiaries and Medicare-Medicaid dual eligibles in comparison, assess what factors determine the dual eligibility status, and examine the association between dual eligibility status and home healthcare service use. Using retrospective observational study of the U.S. 1996-2000 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we find that dual eligible...

BACKGROUND End-of-life (EOL) care imposes heavy economic burdens on patients and health insurers. Little is known about the association between the types of EOL care and healthcare costs for cancer patients across various providers. OBJECTIVE To explore the association of healthcare expenditures with benchmarking indicators of aggressive versus palliative care among terminally ill cancer pati...

The government is planning to introduce free generic and essential medicines in public health facilities. Most people in India buy healthcare from the private sector, a compulsion that accounts for a high proportion of healthcare-related expenditure. To reduce the burden of healthcare costs, the government must improve availability and affordability of generic and essential medicines in the mar...

The aim of this study was to investigate the associations between the incidence of thyroid cancer and the characteristics of healthcare systems in OECD countries and to demonstrate that the increasing incidence of thyroid cancer is mainly due to overdiagnosis. We used a random effects panel model to regress the incidence of thyroid cancer on the characteristics of healthcare systems (i.e., shar...

BACKGROUND Suicide rates traditionally increased with ageing. There is a paucity of studies examining factors associated with age-associated trends in suicide rates. METHODS The relationship between suicide rates and ageing was examined by ascertaining suicide rates in the seven age-bands 16-24 years to 75+ years from the World Health Organisation for 97 countries. The relationship between so...

With rising burdens of obesity and chronic disease, the role of diet as a modifiable risk factor is of increasing public health interest. There is a growing body of evidence that low consumption of dairy products is associated with elevated risk of chronic metabolic and cardiovascular disorders. Surveys also suggest that dairy product consumption falls well below recommended targets for much of...

Introduction The use of healthcare delivery systems is very limited. Primarily in India public sector hospitals does not use any system for managing their health records to provide continued care to patient. The central and state governments are responsible for the provision of primary healthcare in the country. A spending of 1% of the GDP (effectively about Rs 1050 per capita) on public health...