Asthma care quality for children with minority-serving providers.

Objective: To compare asthma care quality for children with and without minority-serving providers.

Design: Cross-sectional telephone survey of parents, linked with a mailed survey of their children's providers.

Setting: A Medicaid-predominant health plan and multispecialty provider group in Massachusetts.

Pediatricians' self-reported clinical practices and adherence to national immunization guidelines after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine.

Background: Little is known about whether pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) has altered pediatricians' practices regarding well-child and acute care.

Objectives: To (1) describe whether PCV caused pediatricians to move other routine infant vaccines and/or add routine visits; (2) characterize adherence to national immunization recommendations; and (3) determine whether PCV altered pediatricians' planned clinical approach to well-appearing febrile infants.

Design And Methods: One year after PCV was added to the pediatric immunization schedule, we mailed a 23-item survey to 691 randomly selected pediatricians in Massachusetts.

Immunization status among children newly enrolled in a health plan: a new frontier for quality measurement?

Background: The National Scientific Panel on Immunization Measurement Standards recently recommended that the assessment population for the childhood immunization measure of the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set include 24-month-olds with > or = 6 months of continuous enrollment in a health plan. The current inclusion criterion is > or = 12 months of continuous enrollment. The new recommendation would expand the assessment population to include children with more recent enrollment.

Pediatricians' views on financial barriers and values for pneumococcal vaccine for children.

Objectives: To 1) describe barriers to pneumococcal conjugate vaccine adoption and 2) estimate the value of the vaccine based on pediatricians' responses to willingness-to-pay questions.

Methods: In June 2000, we mailed a random sample of pediatricians in Massachusetts a questionnaire about barriers to adoption of the vaccine and willingness to pay for the vaccine and associated outcomes. Respondents were assigned at random to 1 of 2 survey versions: the Personal Perspective version, for which they imagined spending their own money for their own child, or the Public Perspective version, for which they imagined spending the government's money for the average child.