Durata e costo delle visite in medicina generale: il progetto DYSCO

In Italy, general practitioners (GPs) operating within the National Health Service (NHS) are paid according to the number of patients followed, without relation to the number of visits performed. This means that, from a theoretical point of view, the marginal cost of an adjunctive medical examination equals to zero. Since this view is clearly little realistic, in this paper we expose a methodological approach to estimate the real cost of a GP visit, starting from data collected in the DYSCO study, a national survey on the medical costs of dystimia in Italy. 46 GPs were asked to record the number and duration of ambulatory and domiciliar visits, along with the time spent in administrative tasks, during 4 weeks, each randomly chosen within a season (spring, summer, autumn, winter). In order to assign a monetary value to each visit, the total fee reimbursed by the NHS to a GP was divided by the total time spent on work, and then again by the number of visits conducted during this time. The calculations performed revealed that the mean duration of a ambulatory visit amounts to about 10 minutes, while a domiciliar visit (including travelling time) lasts almost the double. An interesting result was that summer visits have significantly longer duration than the mean, and consequently cost more. The mean cost of a GP’s ambulatory visit resulted about 12 Euro; a domiciliar visit costs almost 23 Euro. The times and costs calculated in this study are consistent with other calculations performed by other authors in Europe and Italy, confirming the appropriateness of the employed methodology

Cartes de Visite Photograph Collection, 1850s-1890s

The Ronald Olin Collection of Cartes de visite Photographs includes 362 photographs, taken in various places in the United States, Canada and Europe. The date range is from approximately 1850 to 1890, though most are undated. All of the cartes de visite in the collection are portraiture. There are many unique items in this collection. It is a small but nice collection of images both documenting this photographic format type and the time period covered. They also show photographersâ styles of portraiture, including Dakota Territory photographers. The collection highlights how cartes de visite were used for advertising, their use during the Civil War and as souvenir items of famous people. It also provides for the comparison of American and European use of the carte de visite

Durata e costo delle visite in medicina generale: il progetto DYSCO

In Italy, general practitioners (GPs) operating within the National Health Service (NHS) are paid according to the number of patients followed, without relation to the number of visits performed. This means that, from a theoretical point of view, the marginal cost of an adjunctive medical examination equals to zero. Since this view is clearly little realistic, in this paper we expose a methodological approach to estimate the real cost of a GP visit, starting from data collected in the DYSCO study, a national survey on the medical costs of dystimia in Italy. 46 GPs were asked to record the number and duration of ambulatory and domiciliar visits, along with the time spent in administrative tasks, during 4 weeks, each randomly chosen within a season (spring, summer, autumn, winter). In order to assign a monetary value to each visit, the total fee reimbursed by the NHS to a GP was divided by the total time spent on work, and then again by the number of visits conducted during this time. The calculations performed revealed that the mean duration of a ambulatory visit amounts to about 10 minutes, while a domiciliar visit (including travelling time) lasts almost the double. An interesting result was that summer visits have significantly longer duration than the mean, and consequently cost more. The mean cost of a GP’s ambulatory visit resulted about 12 Euro; a domiciliar visit costs almost 23 Euro. The times and costs calculated in this study are consistent with other calculations performed by other authors in Europe and Italy, confirming the appropriateness of the employed methodology