Are the Affordable Care Act Restrictions Warranted? A Contemporary Statewide Analysis of Physician-Owned Hospitals.

Background: The Affordable Care Act placed a moratorium on physician-owned hospital (POH) expansion. Concern exists that POHs increase costs and target healthier patients. However, limited historical data support these claims and are not weighed against contemporary measures of quality and patient satisfaction.

Investigating how implementation intentions improve non-focal prospective memory tasks.

Implementation intentions are a self-regulatory strategy broadly studied in the area of social cognition that can improve realization of one's goals and improve performance on prospective memory tasks. Three experiments, using a non-focal task for which the prospective memory targets were specified at the time of intention formation, investigated whether (and how) implementation intentions can improve non-focal prospective memory performance. An improvement in prospective memory performance was accompanied by an increase in the allocation of conscious resources to the prospective memory task, but not by an increase in perceived importance of the prospective memory task.

The use of a lightly preserved cadaver and full thickness pig skin to teach technical skills on the surgery clerkship--a response to the economic pressures facing academic medicine today.

Background: In response to declining instruction in technical skills, the authors instituted a novel method to teach basic procedural skills to medical students beginning the surgery clerkship.

Methods: Sixty-three medical students participated in a skills training laboratory. The first part of the laboratory taught basic suturing skills, and the second involved a cadaver with pig skin grafted to different anatomic locations.