The killing of 26 students and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut last year was committed by a young man, Adam Lanza, who took his own life before police could apprehend him. Investigative news reports and articles have stated that Lanza had received a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome with sensory integration disorder. Even before significant investigation into Lanza’s past was conducted, however...

Especially during the last decade, tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy (T&A) have been performed increasingly in outpatient surgery facilities. Although complications following T&A are infrequent, they can be serious and have a precipitous onset. Hemorrhage and acute airway obstruction are among the most feared sequelae, and certain patterns have emerged depicting the circumstances under which thes...

The number of outpatient orthopedic surgeries performed within North America continues to increase. The impact of this change in services on patient outcomes is largely unknown. The objective of this review is to compare patient outcomes and associated costs for outpatient orthopedic surgeries traditionally performed in hospital to inpatient surgeries, as well as to summarize the eligibility an...

In this article, the authors estimate a multiple-output cost function for a sample of 2,235 hospitals during the period 1984-88 to disaggregate total costs into inpatient and outpatient components. The results suggest that outpatient cost growth is roughly proportional to that of inpatient cost, despite much higher relative growth in revenues and utilization on the outpatient side. The stabilit...

In this paper optimal outpatient appointment scheduling is studied. A local search procedure is derived that converges to the optimal schedule with a weighted average of expected waiting times of patients, idle time of the doctor and tardiness (lateness) as objective. No-shows are allowed to happen. For certain combinations of parameters the well-known Bailey-Welch rule is found to be the optim...

With the aging of the general population and an increasing number of stroke survivors, there is growing interest in outpatient stroke rehabilitation as a both an extension of and less expensive alternative to inpatient hospital-based programs. In this chapter, we evaluate the effectiveness of three forms of outpatient rehabilitation, which we have defined as: hospital-based, community-based and...

OBJECTIVE The authors' goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of outpatient commitment in reducing victimization among people with severe mental illness. METHOD One hundred eighty-four involuntarily hospitalized patients were randomly assigned to be released (N=99) or to continue under outpatient commitment (N=85) after hospital discharge. An additional group of patients with a recent history...

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is traditionally treated in hospital. Growing evidence from non randomized prospective studies suggests that a substantial proportion of patients with non-massive PE might be safely treated in the outpatient setting using low molecular weight heparins. Based on this evidence, professional societies started to recommend outpatient care for selected patients with non-massi...

OBJECTIVE We investigated the factors contributing to whether or not hypertensive patients brought their home blood pressure records to the outpatient clinic. METHOD We studied 325 hypertensive patients [169 men (66.3+/-11.4 years old) and 156 women (68.1+/-11.2 years old)] who had received medical treatment for hypertension in our outpatient clinic from June to August 2006. RESULTS Of the ...