Public hospital quality report awareness: evidence from National and Californian Internet searches and social media mentions, 2012.

Objectives: Publicly available hospital quality reports seek to inform consumers of important healthcare quality and affordability attributes, and may inform consumer decision-making. To understand how much consumers search for such information online on one Internet search engine, whether they mention such information in social media and how positively they view this information.

Setting And Design: A leading Internet search engine (Google) was the main focus of the study.

Industry in motion: using smart phones to explore the spatial network of the garment industry in New York City.

Industrial agglomerations have long been thought to offer economic and social benefits to firms and people that are only captured by location within their specified geographies. Using the case study of New York City's garment industry along with data acquired from cell phones and social media, this study set out to understand the discrete activities underpinning the economic dynamics of an industrial agglomeration. Over a two week period, data was collected by employing the geolocative capabilities of Foursquare, a social media application, to record every movement of fashion workers employed at fashion design firms located both inside and outside the geographical boundaries of New York City's Garment District.

Measurement and risk adjustment of prelabor cesarean rates in a large sample of California hospitals.

Objective: Prelabor cesareans in women without a prior cesarean is an important quality measure, yet one that is seldom tracked. We estimated patient-level risks and calculated how sensitive hospital rankings on this proposed quality metric were to risk adjustment.

Study Design: This retrospective cohort study linked Californian patient data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality with hospital-level operational and financial data.