BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Emergency department (ED) utilization is a major driver of health care costs. Specialist physicians have an important role in addressing ED utilization, especially at highly specialized, academic medical centers. We sought to investigate whether reporting of ED utilization to specialist physicians can decrease ED visits. METHODS This study analyzed an intervention to...

CONTEXT Substantial racial disparities exist in the delivery of some health care services. Whether racial disparities exist in the duration of office visits to psychiatrists is not known. OBJECTIVE To compare the duration of visits to office-based psychiatrists by white and African American patients. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Analysis of a nationally representative sample of visits ...

BACKGROUND Limited accessibility to health care may be a barrier to obtaining good care. Few studies have investigated the association between access-to-care factors and COPD hospitalizations. The objective of this study is to estimate the association between access-to-care factors and health care utilization including hospital/emergency department (ED) visits and primary care physician (PCP) o...

BACKGROUND To explain why rates of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening including fecal occult blood testing (FOBT), flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS), colonoscopy (CS), and barium enema (BE), are low, this study assessed determinants of CRC screening from medical records. METHODS Data were abstracted from patients aged > or =64 years selected from each clinician from 30 diverse primary care practices...

KEY FINDINGS Data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey •The percentage of all adult visits to office-based physicians made by adults with hypertension increased with age, from 9% for those aged 18-44 to 58% for those aged 75 and over. •Hypertensive medications were provided, prescribed, or continued at 62% of visits made by adults with hypertension. •Eighty-two percent of visits by ...

CONTEXT Psychotropic medications are widely prescribed, but how new classes of psychotropic medications have affected prescribing patterns has not been well documented. OBJECTIVE To examine changes between 1985 and 1994 (data from 1993 and 1994 were combined) in the prescribing patterns of psychotropic medications by office-based primary care physicians, psychiatrists, and other medical speci...

OBJECTIVE This report describes ambulatory care visits made to physician offices within the United States. Statistics are presented on selected physician patient, and visit characteristics for aggregated ambulatory care visits. METHODS The data presented in this report were collected from the 1995 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS). NAMCS is part of the ambulatory care component ...

KEY FINDINGS From 1998 to 2008, the proportion of physician office-based visits in the United States became increasingly concentrated on those aged 45 and over. The intensity of physician office visits, as measured by medications prescribed or continued, imaging tests ordered or provided, and time spent with physicians, also became increasingly concentrated on those aged 45 and over. Although m...

Inhaled corticosteroids (ICSs) are associated with rare systemic adverse drug effects (ADEs) but, more commonly, are associated with oropharyngeal ADEs. The objective of this study was to determine the treatment patterns employed by physicians for ICS-induced oropharyngeal ADEs in order to ultimately determine their economic burden. A panel of 15 physicians completed three rounds of a Delphi pr...