Examining the Trade-off Between NICU Length of Stay and Postdischarge Monitoring: An Instrumental Variables Approach.

Treatment of very low birth weight infants in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can be expensive, particularly in rural areas, but may potentially reduce long-term treatment costs and improve short- and long-term health outcomes. Few studies look at this trade-off. We employed an instrumental variables approach (fuzzy discontinuity) based on changes in practice for the treatment of very low birth weight infants in a perinatal referral center's NICU in 2000-2001.

Thinking outside the curve, part II: modeling fetal-infant mortality.

Background: Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the second of a two-part series that introduces such a framework.

Thinking outside the curve, part I: modeling birthweight distribution.

Background: Greater epidemiologic understanding of the relationships among fetal-infant mortality and its prognostic factors, including birthweight, could have vast public health implications. A key step toward that understanding is a realistic and tractable framework for analyzing birthweight distributions and fetal-infant mortality. The present paper is the first of a two-part series that introduces such a framework.

Identifying health disparities and social inequities affecting childbearing women and infants.

This article presents health disparities and social inequities that may underlie adverse outcomes for childbearing women and infants in the United States. It also presents Internet-accessible databases that nurses can use to assess maternal and infant health disparities at a national or state level. Such assessments are basic to planning programs to address gaps in health care and advocating for practice and policy changes to improve the health care of childbearing women and infants.