BACKGROUND Volunteers have been present in health care settings for centuries. However, there is little empirical evidence regarding the impact that volunteers make on hospital performance. Since the 1990s, hospitals in the United States have had a great deal of pressure to produce high-quality care at minimum expense. These pressures have enhanced the benefits of using volunteers in a hospital...

BACKGROUND Internet consultation without a previous relationship between the doctor and the enquirer seems to be increasing in popularity. However, little is known about the advantages, disadvantages or other differences compared with regular health care when using this kind of service. OBJECTIVE To investigate how an Internet-based Ask the Doctor service out with any pre-existing doctor-pati...

There is currently a wide variation in the level of service provided for patients with epilepsy across the UK. Evidence is becoming available to suggest that improvements in local service provision may be achieved through the intervention of a specialist nurse. Using practical examples, this article explores the roles of the epilepsy specialist nurse, and examines how they may benefit patients ...

BACKGROUND Financial issues are major barriers for rural-to-urban migrants accessing tuberculosis (TB) care in China. This paper discusses the effectiveness of providing financial incentives to migrant TB patients (with a focus on poor migrants in one district of Shanghai using treatment completion and default rates), the effect of financial incentives in terms of reducing the TB patient cost, ...

BACKGROUND Costs of tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment may represent a significant burden for the poor and for the health system in resource-poor countries. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to analyze patients' costs of tuberculosis care and to estimate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of the directly observed treatment (DOT) strategy per completed treatment in Rio de Jan...

295 Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Quality Measures/Downloads/NationalImpact AssessmentofQualityMeasuresFINAL.pdf). 2. Martin AB, Lassman D, Washington B, Catlin A. Growth In US health spending remained slow in 2010; health share of gross domestic product was unchanged from 2009. Health Aff (Millwood) 2012;31:208-19. 3. Jha AK, Joynt KE, Orav EJ, Epstein AM. The long-term effect of Premier pay ...

Key points Many gastrointestinal diseases are symptomdriven, so the patient’s perspective is particularly important in this area. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) provide essential information that objective measures and clinician assessment may fail to capture. PROs can be measured in a scientific, reliable, and valid manner. Generic, disease-specific and treatmentspecific PRO instruments exis...

Healthcare services are often provided to a country as a whole, though in many cases the available resources can be more effectively targeted to specific geographically defined populations. In the case of malaria, risk is highly geographically heterogeneous, and many interventions, such as insecticide-treated bed nets and malaria community health workers, can be targeted to populations in a way...

BACKGROUND With the development of information and communication technologies, telemedicine has been proposed as a way to improve patient management by facilitating access to appropriate diagnosis and treatment. The Paris Ile de France Regional Health Agency is currently funding a comprehensive program of telemedicine experiments. This article describes the protocols for the evaluation of the i...

Approximately 25.8 million Americans are living with diabetes, and an additional 79 million are classified as pre-diabetics. Healthcare costs for a diabetic patient are 2.3 times higher than the costs for a non-diabetic patient. The total cost of diabetes on the United States healthcare system in 2007 was recorded to be $174 billion. Management must be optimized in the most cost-effective manne...