BJ Spitler: geriatric care management pioneer.

The late BJ Curry Spitler pioneered a new geriatric care management business model that combined care management with home health services and emphasized high levels of training and professionalism for all members of the caregiving team. After working with BJ to write a marketing plan emphasizing quality, I learned to appreciate what she did when my mother needed "assisted living at home" services from the firm. Thanks to BJ Curry Spitler and her vision of helping seniors age in place, more elders are able to remain independent in their own homes with dignity and safety, and peace of mind for their families.

Long term care: an essential element of health administration education.

Long-term care represents a career opportunity of choice for many healthcare executives and an education essential for the comprehensive management responsibilities of many others. Yet formal educational programs for health administrators include little academic attention to long-term care. This paper reports on an examination of the curricula and courses of undergraduate health administration educational programs certified or recognized by the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA) and graduate programs accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Management Education (CAHME).

Addressing the need for access to culturally and linguistically appropriate HIV/AIDS prevention for Latinos.

This article reports a comprehensive national needs assessment of Latinos' access to HIV/AIDS prevention and education services in 14 cities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with Latinos who were HIV-positive and at risk for HIV infection. The study explored risk behaviors, access to health care services, and exposure to HIV prevention messages.

Determinants of children's participation in California's Medicaid and SCHIP programs.

Objective: To develop a comprehensive predictive model of eligible children's enrollment in California's Medicaid (Medi-Cal [MC]) and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP; Healthy Families [HF]) programs.

Data Sources/study Setting: 2001 California Health Interview Survey data, data on outstationed eligibility workers (OEWs), and administrative data from state agencies and local health insurance expansion programs for fiscal year 2000-2001.

Study Design: The study examined the effects of multiple family-level factors and contextual county-level factors on children's enrollment in Medicaid and SCHIP.

Promoting organ donation to Hispanics: the role of the media and medicine.

This study assesses the impact of a paid media advertising campaign employing Spanish language, culturally sensitive television and radio spots airing on major Hispanic stations in southern California. An advertising tracking study with a baseline and three postintervention telephone surveys was conducted from 2001 through 2003 among 500 randomly selected self-identified, primarily Spanish language dominant adult Hispanics. Measures of organ donation attitudes and behaviors (decision and declared intent to donate organs) improved significantly (P < .

Can we trust population surveys to count Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured?

Health foundations, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), make multimillion-dollar investments in programs to expand insurance coverage. These efforts are driven largely by estimates of the number of uninsured people derived from population surveys, which might overestimate the number of uninsured people if they under-count people enrolled in Medicaid. This paper reports the results of the RWJF-funded California Medicaid Undercount Experiment (CMUE) to estimate the extent of underreporting of Medicaid in the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) and its effect on estimates of uninsurance.

Consumer-directed health plans: enrollee views, early employer experience.

Purpose: Consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) are a new health insurance product that is of growing interest to employers who are struggling to cope with rising health insurance premium costs and to consumers who are desiring more choice and engagement in their health care. This paper presents the results of a study of California consumer awareness of, and attitudes toward, CDHPs in the context of several national surveys and the experiences of some early-adopting employers.

Design And Methodology: California Health Decisions conducted a telephone survey of 800 insured adult California residents in November 2002.

The Latino Healthcare Professionals Project: responding to the diverse needs of the 21st century.

The Latino Healthcare Professionals Project (LHPP) is a privately-funded initiative to provide healthcare management training to first-generation educated Latino bilingual and bicultural upper division university students planning careers in healthcare. This unique curriculum, scholarship, and mentorship program is based in the Health Care Administration (HCA) Program at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). Initially funded by The Sisters of St.

Models and momentum for insuring low-income, undocumented immigrant children in California.

Undocumented immigrant children are an underserved, vulnerable population that has not benefited from the recent expansion of publicly funded children's health insurance programs. The California Endowment funded a two-year demonstration project to provide subsidized health insurance coverage to more than 7,500 children through five nonprofit organizations. Sustaining and promoting coverage for this population will require continuing subsidies through a mix of private and public funding.

Hispanic perceptions of organ donation.

The low rate of organ donation among Hispanics is of increasing concern to the transplant community at a time when the Hispanic population is growing rapidly, especially in Southern California. OneLegacy, the nation's largest organ procurement organization, commissioned a series of in-depth individual interviews with Spanish-language-dominant Hispanics to identify barriers and motivators to organ and tissue donation. Participants included 5 families who had consented to the donation of a loved one's organs within the past year and 7 families from the general Hispanic public who were either opposed to or ambivalent about organ donation.

Optimizing claims payment for successful risk management.

Disputed claims and delayed payments are among the principal sources of provider and vendor dissatisfaction with managed care payment systems. Timely and accurate claims-payment systems are essential to ensure provider and vendor satisfaction, fiscal stability, and regulatory compliance. A focused analysis of conditions contributing to late payment of claims can disclose problems in provider, vendor, or payer operational and billing procedures, contracting processes, information systems, or human resources management.