Managing the primary care practice on the Web.

Physicians and administrators have little hope of responding appropriately to the challenges of the health care market without data to support decision making. Desired Mayo Clinic s Primary Care Practice was to have the ability to access and integrate data from many platforms in many formats from the Enterprise and bring this information to the desktop in a robust interactive display. The solution was delivery of the data to the Web through an interface using Java with access to Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools for summarization, graphical display and reporting.

Incremental costs of enrolling cancer patients in clinical trials: a population-based study.

Background: Payment for care provided as part of clinical research has become less predictable as a result of managed care. Because little is known at present about how entry into cancer trials affects the cost of care for cancer patients, we conducted a matched case-control comparison of the incremental medical costs attributable to participation in cancer treatment trials.

Methods: Case patients were residents of Olmsted County, MN, who entered phase II or phase III cancer treatment trials at the Mayo Clinic from 1988 through 1994.

A common and clonable environment to support research using patient data.

The volume and complexity of information systems for data oriented clinical research at Mayo Clinic began to exceed available database-analyst resources. A decision was made to generate a clonable, generic system for health services research; this was implemented for a medium-sized prototype project. Since 1988, it has been reconfigured to support several score data projects at less than one-tenth the cost for database analysts.

Comparison of lysis-centrifugation with a biphasic blood culture medium for the recovery of aerobic and facultatively anaerobic bacteria.

The Du Pont Isolator tube and Roche Septi-Chek blood culture bottle employ solid media which facilitate the removal of bacteria from static or cidal substances in blood to increase recovery and decrease detection time. In a comparison of 11,567 blood culture sets, the Isolator tube and vented Roche Septi-Chek bottle were positive for 533 (80%) and 494 (74%) of the aerobic and facultatively anaerobic organisms recovered, respectively. This difference was not significant.