Association Between Receipt of a Medically Tailored Meal Program and Health Care Use.

Importance: Whether interventions to improve food access can reduce health care use is unknown.

Objective: To determine whether participation in a medically tailored meal intervention is associated with fewer subsequent hospitalizations.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using near/far matching instrumental variable analysis.

Improving smoking cessation counseling using a point-of-care health intervention tool (IT): from the Virginia Practice Support and Research Network (VaPSRN).

Purpose: Primary care practices are an ideal setting for reducing national smoking rates because >70% of smokers visit their physician annually, yet smoking cessation counseling is inconsistently delivered to patients. We designed and created a novel software program for handheld computers and hypothesized that it would improve clinicians' ability to provide patient-tailored smoking cessation counseling at the point of care.

Methods: A handheld computer software program was created based on smoking cessation guidelines and an adaptation of widely accepted behavioral change theories.

A multidisciplinary program to educate and advocate for living donors.

Education is critical in decision making and the informed consent process in prospective living donors. Little has been written about how and what living donors should be taught. This article describes a multidisciplinary program for living donor education at the University of Virginia.

Treatment of panic disorder.

Panic disorder with or without agoraphobia occurs commonly in patients in primary care settings. This article assesses multiple evidence-based reviews of effective treatments for panic disorder. Antidepressant medications successfully reduce the severity of panic symptoms and eliminate panic attacks.