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Biomedical subjects

M C Hornbrook

Publications and source records attributed to M C Hornbrook.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1984

Staging of disease. A case-mix measurement.

Measurement of illness severity is required to evaluate diagnostic efficiency of physicians, assess quality of care, understand utilization of health services, design clinical trials, and reimburse hospitals on the basis of output. "Staging" is a method for measuring severity of specific, well-defined diseases. Staging defines discrete points in the course of individual diseases that are clinically detectable, reflect severity in terms of risk of death or residual impairment, and possess clinical significance for prognosis and choice of therapeutic modality. Medical staging criteria have been developed for 420 diagnoses and converted into "coded" criteria for the major diagnostic coding systems. Coded criteria can be efficiently applied to computerized hospital discharge abstracts to derive a comprehensive case-mix classification system. Uses of staging in epidemiologic, case-mix, and utilization analyses are illustrated for diabetes mellitus.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

A partial test of a hospital behavioral model.

The influence of hospital and community characteristics on the behavior of five dimensions of hospital output is examined in this article. These dimensions are the level of emergency stand-by capacity, total admissions, the diagnosis-mix of admissions and the hospital's 'style of practice' with regard to ancillary services and length of stay. A simultaneous equations model is estimated with data from a sample of 63 New England short-term general hospitals for 1970. The findings suggest that various types of short-term general hospitals have distinctive preferences for emergency capacity, volume, case mix and style of practice, and that style of practice may be more appropriately viewed as a rate of resource use per day. Specific findings of interest include the positive interdependence between protection against running out of emergency beds and length of stay, and between length of stay and ancillary service use. Hospitals that admit greater numbers of patients tend to treat more severely ill patients, and sicker patients tend to go to larger hospitals. Hospitals that provide more ancillary services tend to attract the more acutely ill patients. Relationships among other elements of the hospital's utility function represent trade-offs, i.e. substitution, in a constrained world. Among the exogenous factors, patient preferences and ability to pay have strong associations with the types of care provided by hospitals. Highly educated, high income communities, for example, tend to prefer risk averse, service intensive hospital output. Teaching hospitals are shown to prefer higher protection levels, service-intensive patterns of care, and higher admissions levels. Self-paying patients tend to be admitted for more discretionary types of diagnoses and to receive longer diagnosis-specific lengths of stay. A relatively greater supply of physician specialists in the market area is associated with increased use of ancillary services in the hospital. If replicated, these results have significant policy implications for reimbursing teaching hospitals; for defining accessibility of hospital care for the uninsured; for identifying the practice of 'skimming' by proprietary hospitals; and for specifying the role of community preferences in determining hospital performance, especially with respect to quality of care and level of emergency stand-by capacity.

Diagnosis-Related Groups↗
PubMed1983

Allocative medicine: efficiency, disease severity, and the payment mechanism.

Health care expenditures now account for nearly 10 percent of our gross national product, the highest share ever recorded. Concerned that this represents too many resources being devoted to health care, policymakers are searching for ways to control health care expenses. These include higher coinsurance and deductibles, measures to increase market shares of health maintenance organizations, and conversion from cost reimbursement to prospective reimbursement. These measures contain many incentives for patients and providers to alter use of health care services. However, aggregate resource use may or may not be lower and more efficient under these new programs. To determine whether limited resources would be devoted to maximizing the nation's health, incentives inherent in each policy option must be examined. This article describes a classification of types of disease and medical care outputs. The framework is then used to examine incentives offered to patients and providers by three alternative payment mechanisms--capitation, fee-for-service, and payment by diagnosis--regarding types of disease treated and mix of outputs produced. This type of analysis is required to select an appropriate payment mechanism for obtaining a socially acceptable allocation of resources.

Costs and Cost Analysis↗
PubMed1983

Determinants of hospital use: a cross-diagnostic analysis.

This article estimates the effects of personal, clinical, physician, and hospital characteristics in a simultaneous equations model of length of stay and ancillary services use for five narrowly defined medical and surgical conditions. These are tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, gastroenteritis and colitis, inguinal hernia, coronary heart disease, and cholelithiasis. The data are derived from a sample survey of medical and financial records of patients discharged from any of 63 New England short-term general hospitals during the period July 1, 1969 through June 30, 1970. The results confirm the importance of a simultaneous equations formulation of utilization analysis and of inclusion of detailed measures of severity. Length of stay and ancillary services are significantly interrelated for all five conditions, corroborating results of a previous study of obstetric cases. Results for patient's employment status and value of time, attending physician specialty and mode of practice, and hospital size, control, and nature of teaching activities were less conclusive, but suggest differential effects across diagnoses, thus emphasizing the importance of a diagnostic-specific approach to utilization analysis.

Costs and Cost Analysis↗
PubMed1982

Reducing the incidence of non-A,non-B post-transfusion hepatitis by testing donor blood for alanine aminotransferase: economic considerations.

Recent studies have established a relation between elevated alanine aminotransferase levels in donor blood and the incidence of non-A, non-B hepatitis in recipients of such blood. Routine testing of donor blood for alanine aminotransferase activity in order to reduce hepatitis is not currently supported, largely because the results of such testing are unknown. We assessed the potential economic benefits of screening donor blood for alanine aminotransferase as a means to reduce post-transfusion hepatitis. Benefits, defined as the expected costs of hepatitis potentially avoided, ranged from $898 to $31,629 per 1000 blood units collected. This wide range reflected lack of information about the natural history of non-A, non-B hepatitis. Costs were defined as the direct costs of testing and the indirect costs associated with loss of blood product, additional donor recruitment, and informing donors of their abnormal aminotransferase levels; costs ranged from $3,151 to $4,003 per 1000 units. Our results suggest that if prospective studies demonstrate that exclusion of blood with elevated aminotransferase levels decreases non-A, non-B hepatitis in recipients, the net economic impact may be positive. However, because of major uncertainties about the medical consequences of non-A, non-B hepatitis, the benefit estimates are so broad that they preclude a definitive policy decision.

Alanine Transaminase↗
PubMed1981

Economic incentives and control: some issues for research in the VA hospital system.

Within the field of economic research on hospital performance there are four major areas of need. These include the estimation of hospital cost functions, the development of new models of the nonprofit hospital, the development of better measures of hospital output, and an analysis of the determinants of hospital use. Within the Veterans Administration there exist a limited number of policy options to study or aim for in further research, but comparison between the system and other systems is possible and the prospective budgeting process in the VA should also be examined. Specific research can be directed at the case mix and the case-specific patterns of use in the VA system. The effects of the teaching requirements of the Va hospitals also can be more closely studied and the effects of physician and hospital characteristics on the length of stay of inpatients is an important question and may have implications for research outside the system. The potential data wealth of the VA Patient Treatment File and its centralized budgeting system can produce much useful research.

Aged↗
PubMed1981

Patterns of obstetrical care in hospitals.

This article examines the determinants of length of stay and ancillary service use for a single diagnostic category: normal delivery. Data for a systematic sample of 945 obstetrical admissions to 48 New England hospitals during 1969-70 are used to estimate a simultaneous equations model. The exogenous variables include socioeconomic and medical characteristics of the mother, medical condition of the newborn, type of labor and delivery, and hospital and physician characteristics. The important findings are threefold: First, evidence is found supportive of a simultaneous relationship between length of stay and ancillary services for normal deliveries. Second, the results show the importance of controlling for the performance of surgery, the presence of complications, the length of labor and the death of the baby in analyzing obstetrical utilization patterns. Third, holding maternal medical and socioeconomic factors constant, hospital size, teaching status, control and location, as well as physician mode of practice and relationship to the hospital, are important determinants of hospital use. It is concluded that the diagnostic-specific approach to utilization analysis is appropriate and useful. Only within such a narrowed focus can researchers disentangle the confounding effects of the attributes of the disease itself from the impact of hospital and physician characteristics on hospital use.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Market structure and advertising in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry: some implications for public policy.

Distortions in market processes for pharmaceuticals raise the important policy problem of devising measures to improve industry performance. This paper first reviews the basic issues involved in formulating economic policy regarding the pharmaceutical industry. Methods for reducing structural market power and undesirable promotional expenditures are examined, and the impacts of four oft-suggested policy "reforms"--removal of trade names, removal of patents, relaxation of requirements for certification of new drug products, and increased enforcement of antitrust laws--are then analyzed. Finally, problems requiring additional research are identified.

Advertising↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Health-based payment and computerized patient record systems.

Health care information technology is changing rapidly and dramatically. A small but growing number of clinicians, especially those in staff and group model HMOs and hospital-affiliated practices, are automating their patient medical records in response to pressure to improve quality and reduce costs. Computerized patient record systems in HMOs track risks, diagnoses, patterns of care, and outcomes across large populations. These systems provide access to large amounts of clinical information; as a result, they are very useful for risk-adjusted or health-based payment. The next stage of evolution in health-based payment is to switch from fee-for-service (claims) to HMO technology in calculating risk coefficients. This will occur when HMOs accumulate data sets containing records on provider-defined disease episodes, with every service linked to its appropriate disease episode for millions of patients. Computerized patient record systems support clinically meaningful risk-assessment models and protect patients and medical groups from the effects of adverse selection. They also offer significant potential for improving quality of care.

Cost Control↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Measuring the quality of life of the elderly in health promotion intervention clinical trials.

The Multicenter Trials of Frailty and Injuries: Cooperative Studies of Intervention Techniques (FICSIT) is a series of clinical trials of biomedical, behavioral, and environmental interventions to reduce the risks of frailty and injury among the elderly. Reliable assessment of the quality of life reported by the subjects is a central issue in evaluating the interventions. An intervention may have a significant impact on an elderly person's sense of well-being, even though significant improvement is not observed in selected physical outcome measures. Elderly persons' compliance with particular intervention regimens may be influenced by the quality of life effects that they perceive in relation to the intervention. The researchers review the definition and measurement of quality of life in the trials, with particular attention to issues in determining common measures used at all study locations. Practical considerations in the selection and use of quality of life measures in both community and institutional populations are addressed. Topics discussed include the interrelation of aging, functional capacities, and quality of life; the multi-dimensionality of quality of life in relation to differential intervention effects; and age-related issues in the collection of quality of life data. Preliminary observations are reviewed, and potential contributions of FICSIT to intervention-sensitive quality of life assessments among the elderly are noted.

Activities of Daily Living↗