Purpose: Specialty care coordination relies on information flowing bidirectionally between all three participants in the "specialty care triad" - patients, primary care providers (PCPs), and specialists. Measures of coordination should strive to account for the perspectives of each. As we previously developed two surveys to measure coordination of specialty care as experienced by PCPs and specialists, this study aimed to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of a related survey of specialty care coordination as experienced by the patient, thereby completing the suite of surveys among the triad.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic required that our research team change our mail-only (MO) strategy for a research survey to a strategy more manageable by staff working remotely. We used a modified web-push approach (MWP), in which patients were mailed a request to respond online and invited to call if they preferred the questionnaire by mail or phone. We also changed from a pre-completion gift to a post-completion gift card incentive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Use of telehealth for outpatient endocrine care remains common since onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, though the context for its use has matured. We aimed to describe the variation in telehealth use for outpatient endocrine visits under these "new normal" conditions and examine the patient, clinician-, and organization-level factors predicting use.
Methods: Retrospective cross-sectional study using data from the U.
Objective: Outpatient diabetes mellitus (DM) care over video telehealth (TH) requires modifications to how endocrinologists complete physical examinations (PEs). But there is little guidance on what PE components to include, which may incur wide variation in practice. We compared endocrinologists' documentation of DM PE components for in-person (IP) vs TH visits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Homeless and marginally housed (HAMH) individuals experience significant health disparities compared to housed counterparts, including higher hepatitis C virus (HCV) rates. New direct-acting antiviral (DAA) medications dramatically increased screening and treatment rates for HCV overall, but inequities persist for HAMH populations.
Objective: This study examines the range of policies, practices, adaptations, and innovations implemented by Veteran Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) in response to Veterans Health Administration (VHA)'s 2016 HCV funding allocation to expand provision of HCV care.