Supportive Services at End of Life can Help Reduce Acute Care Services: Observations From the Medicare Care Choices Model.

Objectives: This study identifies the mechanisms through which supportive and palliative care services at the end-of-life helped prevent unnecessary use of acute care services.

Background: From 2016 to 2021, the Medicare Care Choices Model (MCCM) tested whether offering Medicare beneficiaries the option to receive supportive and palliative care services through hospice providers, concurrently with treatments for their terminal conditions, improved patients' quality of life and care and reduced Medicare expenditures. Previous MCCM evaluation results showed that the model achieved its goals, but did not examine in depth the causal mechanisms leading to these results.

Association of the Range of Outpatient Services Provided by Primary Care Physicians with Subsequent Health Care Costs and Utilization.

Background: Broader primary care practice range of services (ROS), defined as the diversity of professional services delivered, is associated with lower utilization. ROS provided by individual primary care physicians (PCPs) varies considerably with unclear implications for patients.

Objectives: Create a PCP-ROS measure covering six categories of outpatient services, including expanded codes for mental health counseling services and point of care ultrasound (POCUS) technology in physician offices.

Volunteering and political participation are differentially associated with eudaimonic and social well-being across age groups and European countries.

Voluntary participation is thought to promote the well-being of engaged individuals, especially in old age, but prior evidence on this link is mixed. In the present studies, we used the cross-sectional data from Round 6 (2012) of the European Social Survey (ESS) to investigate the variation in the associations between voluntary participation and eudaimonic (e.g.

fMRI neurofeedback in the motor system elicits bidirectional changes in activity and in white matter structure in the adult human brain.

White matter (WM) plasticity supports skill learning and memory. Up- and downregulation of brain activity in animal models lead to WM alterations. But can bidirectional brain-activity manipulation change WM structure in the adult human brain? We employ fMRI neurofeedback to endogenously and directionally modulate activity in the sensorimotor cortices.