BACKGROUND As the medicine practiced in hospital settings has become more specialized, training in primary care is becoming increasingly essential for medical students, especially for future general practitioners (GPs). Only a few limited studies have investigated the representativeness of medical practices delivering this training. The aim of this study was to assess the representativeness of ...

Language barriers have been found to adversely affect health care in multiple ways, including access to care, quality of care, medical errors, and reduced patient satisfaction.1 Oral communication barriers are only one aspect of a multifaceted problem when there is physician‐patient language discordance.2 Efforts to improve office efficiency, reduce demands on physician time, and provide patien...

BACKGROUND The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) coding system for office visits, which has been in use since 1995, has not been well studied, but it is generally agreed that the system contains much room for error. In fact, the available literature suggests that only slightly more than half of physicians will agree on the same CPT code for a given visit, and only 60% of professional coders ...

The Canadian Hypertension Education Program (CHEP) has the mandate of reducing the burden of cardiovascular disease in Canada through optimized hypertension management. The process of screening, diagnosing, treating, and monitoring hypertension on an ongoing basis generates the single greatest number of family physician office visits in Canada—more than 20 million visits annually.1 This represe...

background: more psychiatric visits, especially non-emergency ones, to emergency departments (eds) of general hospitals have been observed in recent years. the aim of this study was to determine the characteristics of psychiatric visits to the ed of rasoul-e-akram hospital, tehran, iran. methods: in this cross-sectional study, during a two-month period, all psychiatric presentations and consult...

OBJECTIVE To identify factors associated with the cost of treating high-cost Medicare beneficiaries. DATA SOURCES A national sample of 1.6 million elderly, Medicare beneficiaries linked to 2004-2005 Community Tracking Study Physician Survey respondents and local market data from secondary sources. STUDY DESIGN Using 12 months of claims data from 2005 to 2006, the sample was divided into pre...

OBJECTIVE To assess associations between secure patient-clinician email use and clinical services utilisation over time. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study between July 2010 and December 2013. Controlling for a utilisation surge around first secure email use, we analysed difference of differences between propensity score-matched groups of secure patient-clinician email users and non-users for ...

The authors describe the implementation of a depression care management (DCM) program at Colorado Access, a public sector health plan, and describe the program's clinical and system outcomes for members with chronic medical conditions. High medical risk, high cost Medicaid health plan members were identified and systematically screened for depression. A total of 370 members enrolled in the DCM ...