PRISM-E: comparison of integrated care and enhanced specialty referral in managing at-risk alcohol use.

Objective: This study was part of the Primary Care Research in Substance Abuse and Mental Health for the Elderly study (PRISM-E) and determined the relative effectiveness of two different models of care for reducing at-risk alcohol use among primary care patients aged 65 and older.

Methods: This multisite study was a randomized clinical trial comparing integrated care with enhanced specialty referral for older primary care patients screened and identified to have at-risk drinking.

Results: Before the study, the 560 participants consumed a mean of 17.

Parameters of quality assurance: an evolving science.

The quality assurance field is rapidly evolving. The components of the quality assurance field, which include philosophy, assessment tools and methods, analysis and application of data, and research, are each growing in their conceptual validity and are also developing well defined relationships to each other. The philosophy underlying quality assurance has moved from a static concept of quality to conceptualising the quality of care as a dynamic state of health care.

Dental insurance, a successful model facing new challenges.

Dental insurance has been the fastest growing fringe benefit during the 70s. Further, it has evolved into a cost-effective means for getting more people to seek dental treatment. Early worries of the purchaser and the profession about the uninsurability of dental care have largely been solved; to this day, though, no one has developed a model to successfully deliver individual coverage.

Versatile instrument for direct or differential a.c. resistance or conductance measurements on solutions.

A simple but versatile instrument with an electronic (non-servo) measuring circuit is described which is capable of making direct or differential measurements of the resistance or conductance of solutions over an absolute resistance range from 0-1 Omega to l MOmega, in six linear ranges. Linearity is better than 2% on all ranges, and reproducibility is better than 1 %. Drift is less than 1 % over 12 hr.