Insight into patient dissatisfaction with asthma treatment.

Background: Measures of patient satisfaction or dissatisfaction with treatment are increasingly being used as indicators of quality of care. As these measures become more widely used, it is important to know if patient dissatisfaction is associated with important processes or outcomes of medical care.

Methods: Survey of patient-reported asthma management issues using the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire in a large health maintenance organization in the Pacific Northwest.

Association of asthma control with health care utilization and quality of life.

Asthma severity and level of asthma control are two related, but conceptually distinct, concepts that are often confused in the literature. We report on an index of asthma control developed for use in population-based disease management. This index was measured on 5,181 adult members of a large health maintenance organization (HMO), as were various self-reported measures of health care utilization (HCU) and quality of life (QOL).

Monitoring the health status and impact of treatment on Americans: the Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry.

Objective: A major new survey program, the Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry (MBHSR), has been proposed to improve the monitoring of the health status of Medicare beneficiaries. The MBHSR would collect data by mail with telephone follow up of nonrespondents to permit economical assessment of a total Registry of approximately 200,000 Medicare beneficiaries, approximately 54,000 of whom would be surveyed in any given year. (Surveys would be conducted of samples of new enrollees who would be reinterviewed every five years.

The quality of health data obtained in a new survey of elderly Americans: a validation study of the proposed Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry (MBHSR).

The Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry (MBHSR) is a proposed new survey program that would collect health status indicators annually from large probability samples of Medicine beneficiaries. For reasons of economy, the MBHSR would use mail survey procedures with telephone follow-up of nonrespondents. Because of concerns about response rates and the validity and reliability of the data obtained by such methods, a large-scale (N = 1,922) field test was conducted.