Recently added articles from Health Services Research:

Falling short: continued challenges in meeting the mental health needs of children with special health care needs.(Editorial)

Jun 01, 2008; Chandra, Anita ... Nearly one in every five households has a child with a special health care need (CSHCN), and at least one quarter of these children also has a mental health problem. These data underscore the fact that CSHCN have substantial unmet mental health needs; for those with more chronic emotional ...

Prescription drug coverage and effects on drug expenditures among elderly Medicare beneficiaries.(Medicare and the Elderly)

Jun 01, 2008; Huh, Soonim ... Innovations in medical technology, especially pharmaceuticals, have improved health outcomes and quality of life and have replaced surgeries and other invasive treatments. This shift has been one of the main drivers of the rapid growth of spending for prescription drugs during recent ...

How do proxy responses and proxy-assisted responses differ from what Medicare beneficiaries might have reported about their health care?(Medicare and the Elderly)(Survey)

Jun 01, 2008; Elliott, Marc N. ... Surveys of the recipients of health care are increasingly important means of assessing the care provided by health plans, hospitals, physicians, and other entities (Lied et al. 2003; Tai-Seale 2004; Darby, Hays, and Kletke 2005). At the same time, an aging population means that more ...

The financial burden of overweight and obesity among elderly Americans: the dynamics of weight, longevity, and health care cost.(Medicare and the Elderly)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Yang, Zhou ... Approximately 35 percent of U.S. adults are overweight, and an additional 30 percent are obese (Flegal et al. 2002, 2004; Hedley et al. 2004). The increase in rates of overweight and obesity represents a major change in the biological and behavioral characteristics of the U.S. population, ...

Medicaid managed care and the unmet need for mental health care among children with special health care needs.(Medicaid and the Uninsured)(Report)(Survey)

Jun 01, 2008; Tang, Michael H. ... The proportion of the Medicaid population enrolled in managed care rose from 9.5 percent in 1991 to 60.7 percent in 2004 (Mitchell and Gaskin 2004; CMS 2005), reflecting states' decisions to convert Medicaid programs from traditional fee-for-service (FFS) to managed care. As part of this ...

Medicaid undercount and bias to estimates of uninsurance: new estimates and existing evidence.(Medicaid and the Uninsured)(Survey)

Jun 01, 2008; Call, Kathleen Thiede ... There is consensus among researchers that population surveys of health insurance coverage undercount the number of individuals enrolled in Medicaid (Swartz and Purcell 1989; Holahan, Winterbottom, and Rajan 1995; Bennefield 1996; Dubay and Kenney 1996; Lewis, Elwood, and Czajka 1998; ...

Examining variation in treatment costs: a cost function for outpatient methadone treatment programs.(Substance Abuse Treatment)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Dunlap, Laura J. ... Although a substantial literature provides estimates of the total and per-patient costs for substance abuse treatment, relatively little is known about what drives these costs or why large variation in treatment costs is often observed across programs. In this paper, we use data from a ...

Role of state policies in the adoption of naltrexone for substance abuse treatment.(Substance Abuse Treatment)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Heinrich, Carolyn J. ... The development of pharmaceutical agents to quell cravings has the potential to expand access to substance abuse treatment and improve treatment quality for alcohol and drug-dependent individuals. An estimated 19 million individuals (approximately 8 percent of the U.S. population) meet ...

Hospital quality: a PRIDIT approach.(Quality and Guidelines)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Lieberthal, Robert D. ... Measuring and improving hospital quality is an important challenge in any attempt to improve the health care system. It is important because inpatient hospitals provide so much medical care (approximately $500 billion in 2003) (Hippisley-Cox et al. 2006). It is a challenge because medical ...

Shareholder value and the performance of a large nursing home chain.(Quality and Guidelines)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Kitchener, Martin ... During the 1990s, the U.S. nursing home industry was transformed by the growth of large, multifacility corporations (chains) through successive mergers (Kitchener and Harrington 2004). Management researchers heralded this process of nursing home "chaining" as an effective means of ...

The use of linear instrumental variables methods in health services research and health economics: a cautionary note.(Methods)(Report)

Jun 01, 2008; Terza, Joseph V. ... When analyzing data with the goal of informing health policy, the ability to draw true causal inference from the estimation results is of paramount importance. The typical health policy analysis focuses on identifying the effect that a variable, over which there exists some degree of ...