"Surgery is certainly one good option": quality and time-efficiency of informed decision-making in surgery.

Background: Informed decision-making has been widely promoted in several medical settings, but little is known about the actual practice in orthopaedic surgery and there are no clear guidelines on how to improve the process in this setting. This study was designed to explore the quality of informed decision-making in orthopaedic practice and to identify excellent time-efficient examples with older patients.

Methods: We recruited orthopaedic surgeons, and patients sixty years of age or older, in a Midwestern metropolitan area for a descriptive study performed through the analysis of audiotaped physician-patient interviews.

"It's not what you say ...": racial disparities in communication between orthopedic surgeons and patients.

Background: Excellent communication between surgeons and patients is critical to helping patients to make informed decisions and is a key component of both high quality of care and patient satisfaction. Understanding racial disparities in communication is essential to provide quality care to all patients.

Objective: To examine the content and process of informed decision-making (IDM) between orthopedic surgeons and elderly white versus African American patients.

Impact of HMO withdrawals on vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries.

The Medicare+Choice (M+C) program has faced successive waves of plan withdrawals since 1999. We collected data from 1,055 beneficiaries who were involuntarily disenrolled from a health maintenance organization (HMO) that withdrew from six large markets in 1999 to investigate how they were impacted by the forced change in coverage. Administrative data from this HMO were used to oversample beneficiaries who were perceived to be vulnerable based on their poor health status in the period before the HMO withdrawal.

The heterogeneity of schizophrenia in disease states.

Previous Presentation: Some of the contents of this paper have been previously presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Technology Assessment in Health Care June 20, 2000 in the Hague, Netherlands and at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making as a poster on October 3, 1999 in Reno, NV.

Background: Studies of schizophrenia treatment often oversimplify the array of health outcomes among patients. Our objective was to derive a set of disease states for schizophrenia using the Positive and Negative Symptom Assessment Scale (PANSS) that captured the heterogeneity of symptom responses.

Impact of differential response rates on the quality of data collected in the CTS physician survey.

Survey administrators face trade-offs between expending additional survey resources to maximize response rates versus using fewer resources and accepting lower response rates. Using data from the Community Tracking Study's Physician Survey, we examined how survey estimates and data quality changed as additional respondents completed the survey. Results showed that improvements in response rates over the range examined (i.