Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D Neuhauser.
Firms research combines parallel providers of care, ongoing patient randomization, and continuous experimental changes and improvement. This form of efficient research now has a substantial track record of published studies by a growing number of hospitals.
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In the future, health care delivery systems may need to respond to requests from payers to demonstrate the quality of care they provide for types of patients or diseases. Here, asthma is used as an example of what such a response might look like in the context of continuous quality improvement.
This article describes a medical school's effort to introduce quality improvement (QI) concepts and methods through experiential learning to students as part of a required eight-week primary care clerkship. Each student describes a patient with asthma, investigates the cost of care, and assesses the outcome through an interview with the patient. These patients are considered together as recipients of an areawide process of care. The statistical tools of QI were adapted in a workbook to help students understand care as a process and their role as physicians in improving it.
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Costa Rica has been unusually successful in providing high levels of health for its people given its economic resources. It is proposed that there are two reasons for its success. Having no military, Costa Rica has had resources to invest in health care. Having a relatively equal income and education distribution and a democratic government, it has been able to provide health care widely rather than just to the elites. This paper examines production functions for health and possible directions for appropriate management of health as Costa Rica confronts the chronic disease pattern of the developed world.
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Ernest Amory Codman, M.D., was one of the most important figures in the history of outcomes research in medicine. While his contemporaries scorned his efforts to create systematic procedures to evaluate the end results of medical care, his work foreshadowed many of today's most pressing issues in technology assessment. This article traces Codman's career as an innovator and political gadfly at the Massachusetts General Hospital during the first three decades of this century, and examines the development and demise of his end-result system.
Serious hemorrhagic complications have been reported with percutaneous biopsy, albeit infrequently. A hemostatic protein-polymer sheath (PPS) designed to limit the risk of bleeding was evaluated by performing liver biopsies on pigs given anticoagulants. After administration of anesthesia and laparotomy, biopsies were performed under direct vision with a cutting biopsy needle (a) alone, (b) fitted with the PPS, or (c) fitted with a thrombin-coated PPS. Dry sponges were applied and subsequently weighted to quantitate blood loss. At all levels of anticoagulation, use of the PPS enhanced hemostasis; the thrombin coating supplemented effectiveness. The PPS appears to be a simple and effective method of achieving hemostasis at high-risk percutaneous biopsy.
Quality care reemerges as an issue amid the primary concern for cost. Primary problems revolve around whether treatments are efficacious and appropriate for the individual patient and whether the practice of medicine is being performed competently. A model is suggested for how these questions might be addressed.
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A professional layman speculates on the role of public voice in medical care--on ways of making organizations responsive to the public's wishes. Research conducted as a participant observer in the functioning of human subjects committees, hospital trustees, and a government regulatory body reveals the public interest to be no match for the special interest. Unusual proposals are offered to improve the public's control mechanisms; the marketplace and the polling place may yet serve well.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.