Hospital resource allocation and insurance coverage.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
SEARCH · Search PubMed
Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
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.
Resources for health care are limited in all societies; decisions have to be made about who gets what health care. A case study is discussed. Jaymee Bowen was a British child whose Health Authority refused to provide free treatment for her advanced leukaemia. The media advertised her case and public opinion was mobilized in favour of treating her with public funds. Cost-effectiveness can be used to identify treatments that provide value-for-money. The public can express an opinion on what kinds of care are wanted--for example, what are the relative benefits of preventing morbidity or mortality, or of helping children rather than young people? Rational criteria can be developed with public involvement--in the case of Jaymee Bowen, the proposed treatment really did not appear to offer value-for money. But some individual cases that contradict the 'rational' criteria for the population as a whole will always be able to attract public sympathy and interest.
The aim of this study was to examine attitudes to prioritization in health care among the general public, politicians, doctors and nurses. The focus in this paper is on the types of services from a perspective that is 'policy analytical'. This study forms part of the wider 'Prioritization in Health Care Project' carried out at the University of Kuopio exploring patient treatment level prioritizations. Data were collected by a postal questionnaire in 1995. Four groups were established for the study: (1) a general public sample of 2000 subjects, (2) a random sample of 1000 nurses, (3) a random sample of 1500 medical doctors and (4) a sample of 2200 politicians involved in social and health care administration. Respondents were asked to make value choices between specialized and primary health care services in a real budget situation. One of the most salient findings in this study was that attitudes towards priorities are context-dependent. Certain differences were observed between the groups studied. The attitudes of the general public and nurses were quite similar, while similar views were shared by politicians and doctors. The attitudes of the respondents reflect well what has actually happened in Finnish health care, with the exception of psychiatric services which have undergone drastic cuts.
We argue that health programs are administered in settings that often violate the frequently stated assumption of constant returns to scale in the provision of health services. Three types of returns to scale are identified from the general economic literature: returns to scale with respect to population, effectiveness, and quality. We show that decision rules based on incremental cost-effectiveness ratios or cost-benefit tests are not optimal if returns to scale are not constant. We derive the optimal decision rules under variable returns to scale using optimization techniques, and employ several examples to illustrate the concepts and methods.
As hospital-based managers are being confronted with changing patterns of reimbursement, ranging from revenue generating to cost management, it is imperative that hospitals know the exact nursing costs associated with the actual care delivered to specific patients. Nursing care has traditionally been bundled into the room rate for patients. This approach is extremely limiting when facilities are negotiating per diem rates and capitated rate contracts. At Braintree Hospital Rehabilitation Network, the nursing department has developed and implemented an activity-based management system to determine the actual cost of nursing care provided to each patient. This approach, which differentiates nursing costs accurately by diagnostic group and by intensity of nursing care, has contributed to the hospital's success in negotiating individual patient contracts with insurers in the managed care environment that increasingly focuses on costs and outcomes. Another result has been to enhance the accuracy of the network's cost accounting system.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Two dual-task experiments are reported bearing on the issue of slower processing time for severe chronic closed-head injury (CHI) patients compared to matched controls. In the first experiment, a classical psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm was employed, in which two sequential stimuli, a pure tone and a colored dot, were presented at variable stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), each associated with a distinct task. The task on the tone required a speeded vocal response based on pitch, and the task on the colored dot required a speeded manual response based on color. In the second experiment, either one or three masked letters was presented, followed by a pure tone at variable SOAs. The task on the letters required a delayed report of the letters at the end of each trial. The task on the tone required an immediate manual response based on pitch. In both experiments, both CHI patients and matched controls reported an SOA-locked slowing of the speeded response to the second stimulus, a PRP effect. The PRP effect was more substantial for CHI patients than for matched controls, suggesting that a component of the slower processing time for CHI patients was related to a selective increase in temporal demands for central processing of the stimuli.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
In two experiments, a speeded sorting task was administered to children. In each sorting, the child was instructed to sort a deck of cards according to values on one dimension while the values of a second irrelevant dimension were held constant, were correlated, or were varied orthogonally. Experiment 1 evaluated developmental changes in perceived structure as compared with such changes in the control of attention. Different groups of kindergarten, 2d-, and 5th-grade children performed the task with spatially integrated vs spatially separated dimensions. The results indicate that with spatially integrated dimensions there is a trend from holistic to featural perception and an increase in attentional control with increasing age. Spatially separate dimensions are perceived dimensionally at all ages, but show a trend in attentional development. In Experiment 2, the spatially integrated dimensions of Experiment 1 were made separable by portraying different targets within a configuration in different colors. The theoretical implications of the results are discussed.
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.
Four experiments investigated Pearce and Hall's (1980) proposal that a decrease in the predictive accuracy of a stimulus restores stimulus associability as reflected by increased orienting and controlled processing. The experiments examined the effects of miscuing or omission on stimulus associability as assessed by stimulus expectancy, electrodermal responding, and reaction time (RT) to a secondary task probe stimulus. In Experiments 1 and 2, a control group received 21 S1-S2 trials intermixed with 21 S3-alone presentations. For the experimental group, S2 was miscued by its presentation following S3 on two trials. In Experiments 1 and 2a, S1, S2, and S3 were moderate intensity stimuli, but in Experiment 2b, shock was used as S2. Experiment 1 (N = 24) demonstrated that, although there was uncertainty about whether S2 would follow S3 when S3 was re-presented following miscuing, skin conductance responses to S3 did not differ according to whether or not it had miscued the previous S2. Experiment 2a (N = 48) and Experiment 2b (N = 24) demonstrated that RT to white noise probe stimuli presented during the S3-alone presentation immediately following miscuing did not differ between experimental (miscuing) and control (no miscuing) groups. In Experiments 3 and 4, a control group received 23 S1-S2 trials. For the experimental group, S2 was omitted on two trials. In Experiment 3 (N = 24) S1 and S2 were of moderate intensity, whereas in Experiment 4 (N = 24) shock was used as S2. Reaction time to white noise probes presented during S1 did not differ according to whether or not the previous S2 was omitted. Thus, despite evidence of a reduction in the predictive accuracy of both S3 following miscuing and S1 following omission, there was no evidence of restoration of the associability of either S1 or S3. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of associative learning.