Understanding the relationships between health care provider usage and demographics of patients is necessary for the development of educational materials, outreach information, and programs targeting individuals who may benefit from services. This analysis identified relationships between health care provider usage and individual's demographics. A sample of Midwestern U.S. respondents (n = 1265...

Health care providers offer an ideal setting to study the effectiveness of resilient behavior. The notion of a resilient organization is an emerging concept for understanding and coping with the modern-day pace of change and associated work stress. Resilience is the ability of an individual or organization to expeditiously design and implement positive adaptive behaviors matched to the immediat...

This paper addresses the issue of whether the recent significant uptick in provider mergers and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act have a particularly adverse effect on provider pricing in the commercial insurance market. Uncompetitive provider markets exacerbate already existing high cost issues such as lack of transparency in provider pricing, patient behavior that conflates reputa...

PURPOSE Medicare's merit-based incentive payment system and narrowing of physician networks by health insurers will stoke clinicians' and policy makers' interest in care delivery attributes associated with value as defined by payers. METHODS To help define these attributes, we analyzed 2009 to 2011 commercial health insurance claims data for more than 40 million preferred provider organizatio...

BACKGROUND Approximately 90% of Malawian women attend antenatal care at least once during their pregnancies; however, most mothers first present during months five and six and do not adhere to the World Health Organization's recommended four visits. The objective of this study was to explore the role the patient-provider relationship has on antenatal care uptake. METHODS A qualitative study, ...

INTRODUCTION In April 2008, Japan launched a radical reform in regional health planning that emphasized the development of disease-oriented clinical care pathways. These 'inter-provider critical paths' have sought to ensure effective integration of various providers ranging among primary care practitioners, acute care hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, long-term care facilities and home care....

Objective-This report presents national estimates on the provision and use of complementary and alternative therapies (CAT) in hospice. Comparisons of organizational characteristics of hospice care providers are presented by whether the provider offered CAT. Comparisons of selected characteristics of patients discharged from hospice are presented by whether they received care from a provider th...

A central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. In tax-funded European health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...

OBJECTIVE We seek to determine the optimized multidisciplinary care team (MDCT) composition for antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. METHODS We analyzed all new regimen starts (n = 10,801; 7071 ART naive, 3730 ART experienced) among HIV-positive patients in Kaiser Permanente California from 1996 to 2006. We measured 12-month adherence to ART (pharmacy refill methodology) and medical center...