Medicare home health payment reform may jeopardize access for clinically complex and socially vulnerable patients.

The Affordable Care Act directed Medicare to update its home health prospective payment system to reflect more recent data on costs and use of services-an exercise known as rebasing. As a result, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will reduce home health payments 3.5 percent per year in the period 2014-17.

Care coordination and unmet specialty care among children with special health care needs.

Objectives: Care coordination and the medical home may ensure access to specialty care. Children with special health care needs (CSHCN) have higher rates of specialty care use and unmet need compared with the general pediatric population. We hypothesized that care coordination, regardless of whether it was provided in a medical home, would decrease unmet specialty care needs among CSHCN and that the effect of care coordination would be greater among low-income families.

Racial and ethnic differences in subspecialty service use by children with autism.

Objective: To describe racial differences in use of specialty care among children with autism spectrum disorder.

Methods: We identified patients ages 2 to 21 years with an International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision code of autism (299.0) seen from 2000 to 2011 at a major academic health center by using a research patient data repository and determined rates of specialty provider visits and procedures by race.

Latino families, primary care, and childhood obesity: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Few successful treatment modalities exist to address childhood obesity. Given Latinos' strong identity with family, a family-focused intervention may be able to control Latino childhood obesity.

Purpose: To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of a family-centered, primary care-based approach to control childhood obesity through lifestyle choices.

The medical home: relationships with family functioning for children with and without special health care needs.

Objective: In this study we tested the association of the medical home with family functioning for children without and with special health care needs (CSHCN).

Methods: We used data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health to run multivariate logistic regressions to test the association between having a medical home and family functioning (difficulty with parental coping, parental aggravation, childcare/work issues, and missed school days). We further assessed interactions of CSHCN status with having a medical home.

Extending the time: solvothermal syntheses, crystal structures, and properties of two non-isostructural thioantimonates with the composition [Mn(tren)]Sb2S4.

The two novel compounds, [Mn(tren)]Sb2S4 (1 and 2), were obtained by the reaction of elemental Mn, Sb, and S in aqueous solutions of tren (tren = tris(2-aminoethyl)amine, C6H18N4) after different reaction times. Compound 1 is formed up to a reaction time of 13 d, and an extension of the reaction time leads to the formation of 2. Both compounds crystallize in monoclinic space groups (1, P2(1)/c; 2, C2/c).