Initial steps for the Portuguese Atlas of geographical variation in healthcare.

Non-clinical aspects contribute to differences in healthcare practices within each country, which may imply that some patients do not receive the care they need. In contrast, others may not benefit from the care that they receive. However, to the authors' knowledge, only a few geographical variation studies with a national scope were recently conducted in Portugal.

Scaling-up digital follow-up care services: collaborative development and implementation of Remote Patient Monitoring pilot initiatives to increase access to follow-up care.

Background: COVID-19 increased the demand for Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) services as a rapid solution for safe patient follow-up in a lockdown context. Time and resource constraints resulted in unplanned scaled-up RPM pilot initiatives posing risks to the access and quality of care. Scalability and rapid implementation of RPM services require social change and active collaboration between stakeholders.

Case management intervention of high users of the emergency department of a Portuguese hospital: a before-after design analysis.

Background: Emergency department (ED) High users (HU), defined as having more than ten visits to the ED per year, are a small group of patients that use a significant proportion of ED resources. The High Users Resolution Group (GRHU) identifies and provides care to HU to improve their health conditions and reduce the frequency of ED visits by delivering patient-centered case management integrated care. The main objective of this study was to measure the impact of the GRHU intervention in reducing ED visits, outpatient appointments, and hospitalizations.

Formal home care use and spousal health outcomes.

This study explores the relationship between formal home care provided by paid professionals and spousal health outcomes. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, a panel of older adults living in several European countries. We match new formal home care users to non-users to eliminate baseline (t-1) differences between couples who decide to seek formal home care in t and those who do not.