Detecting Medicare Abuse

This paper identifies which types of patients and hospitals have abusive Medicare billings that are responsive to law enforcement. For a 20 percent random sample of elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized from 1994-98 with one or more of six illnesses that are prone to abuse, we obtain longitudinal claims data linked with Social Security death records, hospital characteristics, and state/year-level anti-fraud enforcement efforts. We show that increased enforcement leads certain types of types of patients and hospitals to have lower billings, without adverse consequences for patients' health outcomes.

Types of patients in a psychiatric intensive care unit

Objective: This paper reports the findings of a descriptive study of a patient populationover a three-month period on an eight bed psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) in Western Australia. The report provides a quantitative insight into the profile of patients in PICUs. It provides information on patients' diagnoses, presenting signs, symptoms and/or behaviours,legal codes assigned to patients, treatment interventions and management. Method: Data were collected prospectively from August to October 1999. A total of 122 patients were admitted to the PICU during the review period. Data were entered into an Access program then exported to SPSS (Version 9 for Windows) for analysis and frequency distributions were obtained. Results: The results confirmed that the majority of patients admitted to the PICU were assessed as a high level of risk or needed containment. This finding is in line with the admission criteria developed by staff working in the PICU. It also supports the view that staffworking in these units require expertise and confidence to communicate with and manage potentially aggressive and highly aroused patients. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the importance of ongoing evaluations of patient populations in promoting best practice initiatives in psychiatric care

Barriers To Recovery For Bangor\u27s Buprenorphine Patients

There are several buprenorphine providers at EMMc\u27s Center for Family Medicine serving the greater Bangor, ME region - an area of substantial opiate use. Among the patient population of outpatient buprenorphine users, both locally and nationally, there are high rates of relapse (~32%). In order to decrease relapse rates, it\u27s first imperative to conduct a baseline review of the current buprenorphine population to identify specific types of patients who are at higher risk of relapse. By understanding the barriers to recovery, the office hopes to apply an intervention to the current program, targeting this local demographic more effectively.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1098/thumbnail.jp

The Personality Types of Patients with Heart Diseases and Pacularities of Their Assesments

У статті проаналізовано наукову літературу, яка висвітлює типи поведінки хворих на серцево-судинні захворювання, а також поняття типу поведінки А, В, С, D, Т, їх основні характеристики й особливості діагностики. Дібрано психологічні методики для визначення типів поведінки хворих. The article analys the theoretical literature, which reveals the particular types of individual behavior of patients with heart diseases. It disclosed such concepts of type as A, B, C, D, T, their main characteristics and assesment features. The psychological methods are chosen to define the types of patients with heat diseases

The Pregnancy Project: Impact of Ultrasound Use During Pregnancy Care

Use of ultrasounds during pregnancy continues to increase and there is much debate as to what the best practice is regarding their use, for what types of patients, at what volume level. Current evidence suggests, the extended routine use of ultrasound technology should be for all women that present complications to screen for structural anomalies during pregnancy. However, others have suggested that excessive ultrasound use may be both unnecessary, costly and potentially harmful. Evidence further suggests that mothers find the use of technology to be security enhancing during pregnancy and through the process of care, and that ultrasound use is important for boding with their unborn baby. Here, I examine the impact of ultrasound use on care satisfaction in a panel of women who have given birth in the northeast through a retrospective survey. Findings suggest that ultrasound use is not a driver of care satisfaction overall, however physicians may be acting on this differently with the coming implications of health care reform

Establishing a Fair Playing Field for Payment by Results

The English government has encouraged private providers – known as Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) – to treat publicly funded (NHS) patients. Providers are paid a fixed price per patient treated, adjusted to reflect geographical differences in input costs. But there may be other legitimate cost variations between providers. This report considers the regulatory and production-process constraints that could cause public and private providers costs to differ. Most of these exogenous cost differentials can be rectified by adjustments to the regulatory system or to the payment method. We find evidence that ISTCs are treating different types of patients than NHS hospitals. If these differences drive costs, payments for treatment might need to be differentiated by setting.

Identifying Patient Groups based on Frequent Patterns of Patient Samples

Grouping patients meaningfully can give insights about the different types of patients, their needs, and the priorities. Finding groups that are meaningful is however very challenging as background knowledge is often required to determine what a useful grouping is. In this paper we propose an approach that is able to find groups of patients based on a small sample of positive examples given by a domain expert. Because of that, the approach relies on very limited efforts by the domain experts. The approach groups based on the activities and diagnostic/billing codes within health pathways of patients. To define such a grouping based on the sample of patients efficiently, frequent patterns of activities are discovered and used to measure the similarity between the care pathways of other patients to the patients in the sample group. This approach results in an insightful definition of the group. The proposed approach is evaluated using several datasets obtained from a large university medical center. The evaluation shows F1-scores of around 0.7 for grouping kidney injury and around 0.6 for diabetes

The Borrmann tumors types of patients who underwent combined surgery on locally advanced stomach cancer

Мета роботи – з'ясувати клінічну значимість макроскопічних типів за Borrmann у хворих на місцево-поширений рак шлунка (МПРШ), яким виконано комбіновані операційні втручання.Цель работы – выяснить клиническую значимость макроскопических типов по Borrmann у больных местно-распространенным раком желудка (МРРЖ), которым выполнены комбинированные операционные вмешательства (КОВ).Purpose - to determine the clinical significance of Bormann macroscopic types in patients with locally advanced gastric cancer (LAGC), that combined surgeries were performed

Hoarding Symptoms Are Not Exclusive to Hoarders

Hoarding Disorder (HD) was originally conceptualized as a subcategory of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and numerous studies have in fact focused exclusively on investigating the comorbidity between OCD and HD. Hoarding behavior can nevertheless also be found in other clinical populations and in particular in patients with eating disorders (ED), anxiety disorders (AD), major depression (MD), and psychotic disorders (PD). The current study was carried out with the aim of investigating, using a validated instrument such as the Saving Inventory-Revised (SI-R), the presence of HD symptoms in patients diagnosed with ED, AD, MD and PD. Hoarding symptomatology was also assessed in groups of self-identified hoarders (SIH) and healthy controls. The results revealed that 22.5% of the ED patients exceeded the cut-off for the diagnosis of HD, followed by 7.7% of the patients with MD, 7.4% of the patients with AD, and 5.9% of the patients with PD. The patients with ED had significantly higher SI-R scores than the other groups in the Acquisition and Difficulty Discarding scales while the AD, MD, and PD patients were characterized exclusively by Difficulty Discarding. These data suggest to clinicians that hoarding symptoms should be assessed in other types of patients and especially in those affected by Bulimia and Binge eating

Orthotic management of cerebral palsy : recommendations from a consensus conference

An international multidisciplinary group of healthcare professionals and researchers participated in a consensus conference on the management of cerebral palsy, convened by the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics. Participants reviewed the evidence and considered contemporary thinking on a range of treatment options including physical and occupational therapy, and medical, surgical and orthotic interventions. The quality of many of the reviewed papers was compromised by inadequate reporting and lack of transparency, in particular regarding the types of patients and the design of the interventions being evaluated. Substantial evidence suggests that ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs) that control the foot and ankle in stance and swing phases can improve gait efficiency in ambulant children (GMFCS levels I-III). By contrast, little high quality evidence exists to support the use of orthoses for the hip, spine or upper limb. Where the evidence for orthosis use was not compelling consensus was reached on recommendations for orthotic intervention. Subsequent group discussions identified recommendations for future research. The evidence to support using orthoses is generally limited by the brevity of follow-up periods in research studies; hence the extent to which orthoses may prevent deformities developing over time remains unclear. The full report of the conference can be accessed free of charge at www.ispoint.org