Development of a specialty intensity score to estimate a patient's need for care coordination across physician specialties.

Backgrounds And Aims: This article develops a Specialty Intensity Score, which uses patient diagnosis codes to estimate the number of specialist physicians a patient will need to access. Conceptually, the score can serve as a proxy for a patient's need for care coordination across doctors. Such a measure may be valuable to researchers studying care coordination practices for complex patients.

Exploring the Validity of Developing an Interdisciplinarity Score of a Patient's Needs: Care Coordination, Patient Complexity, and Patient Safety Indicators.

Despite the Affordable Care Act's push to improve the coordination of care for patients with multiple chronic conditions, most measures of coordination quality focus on a specific moment in the care process (e.g., medication errors or transfer between facilities), rather than patient outcomes.

Does Better Nurse Staffing Improve Detection of Depression and Anxiety As Secondary Conditions in Hospitalized Patients with Pneumonia?

Identifying anxiety and depression in hospital patients has important implications for the quality of care, including reducing hospital admissions, promoting patient-centered care, and improving long-term patient outcomes. Hospital admissions are important opportunities for uncovering mental illness; whether hospitals actually take advantage of these important opportunities may depend on staffing. Nurse staffing is central to achieving the goals outlined by patient-centered care initiatives.

Health care supply and county-level variation in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder prescription medications.

Purpose: Although much literature reports small-area variation in medication prescriptions used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), scant research has examined factors that may drive this variation. We examine, across counties in the USA, whether the use of prescription medications to treat ADHD varies positively with supply-side healthcare characteristics.

Methods: We retrieved annual prescription data for ADHD medications in 2734 US counties from a nationally representative sample of 35 000 pharmacies in 2001-2003.