Taxes on Sugar-Sweetened Beverages to Reduce Overweight and Obesity in Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review.

Background: The consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), which can lead to weight gain, is rising in middle-income countries (MICs). Taxing SSBs may help address this challenge. Systematic reviews focused on high-income countries indicate that taxing SSBs may reduce SSB consumption.

Factors affecting adoption and implementation of AHRQ health literacy tools in pharmacies.

Background: Pharmacies are key sources of medication information for patients, yet few effectively serve patients with low health literacy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) supported the development of four health literacy tools for pharmacists to address this problem, and to help assess and improve pharmacies' health literacy practices.

Objectives: This study aimed to understand the facilitators and barriers to the adoption and implementation of AHRQ's health literacy tools, particularly a tool to assess a pharmacy's health literacy practices.

Reduction in medication errors in hospitals due to adoption of computerized provider order entry systems.

Objective: Medication errors in hospitals are common, expensive, and sometimes harmful to patients. This study's objective was to derive a nationally representative estimate of medication error reduction in hospitals attributable to electronic prescribing through computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems.

Materials And Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review and applied random-effects meta-analytic techniques to derive a summary estimate of the effect of CPOE on medication errors.

Disenrollment information and Medicare plan choice: is more information better?

To help Medicare beneficiaries and their intermediaries select the best health plan, CMS publicly reports comparative plan information. Using a laboratory version of Medicare Health Plan Compare that involved a simulated plan choice by 359 Medicare intermediaries, we experimentally investigated plan recommendations with and without disenrollment information and time constraints for viewing materials. Results indicated that the presence of disenrollment information reduced time spent on other measures of plan performance.

Patients' preferences for technical versus interpersonal quality when selecting a primary care physician.

Objective: To assess patients' use of and preferences for information about technical and interpersonal quality when using simulated, computerized health care report cards to select a primary care provider (PCP).

Data Sources/study Setting: Primary data collected from 304 adult consumers living in Los Angeles County in January and February 2003.

Study Design/data Collection: We constructed computerized report cards for seven pairs of hypothetical individual PCPs (two internal validity check pairs included).

Preference for natural: instrumental and ideational/moral motivations, and the contrast between foods and medicines.

Preference for natural refers to the fact that in a number of domains, especially food, people prefer natural entities to those which have been produced with human intervention. Two studies with undergraduate students and representative American adults indicate that the preference for natural is substantial, and stronger for foods than for medicines. Although healthfulness is often given as a reason for preferring natural foods, even when healthfulness or effectiveness (for medicines) of the natural and artificial exemplars is specified as equivalent, the great majority of people who demonstrate a preference for natural continue to prefer natural.

Reporting about health care quality: a guide to the galaxy.

A review of research on the reporting of health care quality information and related fields in applied social and cognitive science led to identification of seven basic principles that should be followed when planning to report health care quality information to consumers or other audiences: (a) know the audience: who they are, what they care about, and what actions they can take; (b) identify constraints that limit what is feasible; (c) consider barriers and facilitators to achieving objectives; (d) identify specific behaviors to target for change, and prioritize objectives; (e) design a report that specifically incorporates priorities and reflects trade-offs; (f) develop a plan for promotion and dissemination from the beginning; and (g) build in ongoing testing and evaluation to identify successes and areas needing improvement. Case studies provide many examples of unsuccessful reporting efforts that might have succeeded had these guiding principles been followed.

Health plan choice and information about out-of-pocket costs: an experimental analysis.

Many consumers are offered two or more employer-sponsored health insurance plans, and competition among health plans for subscribers is promoted as a mechanism for balancing health care costs and quality. Yet consumers may not receive the information necessary to make informed health plan choices. This study tests the effects on health plan choice of providing supplemental decision-support materials to inform consumers about expected health plan costs.

Do consumer reports of health plan quality affect health plan selection?

Objective: To learn whether consumer reports of health plan quality can affect health plan selection.

Data Sources: A sample of 311 privately insured adults from Los Angeles County.

Study Design: The design was a fractional factorial experiment.

Further explorations of medical decisions for individuals and for groups.

Background: Important discrepancies between clinical practice and health policy may be related to the ways in which physicians and others make decisions about individuals and groups. Previous research has found that physicians and laypersons asked to consider an individual patient generally make different decisions than those asked to consider a group of comparable patients, but this discrepancy has not been observed in more recent studies. This study was designed to explore possible reasons for these findings.

Public preferences for prevention versus cure: what if an ounce of prevention is worth only an ounce of cure?

Background: The belief that small preventive efforts bring large benefits may explain why many people say they value prevention above all other types of health care. However, it often takes a great deal of preventive medicine to prevent a bad outcome. This study explores whether people value prevention or cure more when each brings the same magnitude of benefit and examines whether preferences for prevention or cure vary according to the severity of the disability of the patients who can receive the preventive or curative intervention.

Protected Values.

Protected values are those that resist trade-offs with other values, particularly economic values. We propose that such values arise from deontological rules concerning action. People are concerned about their participation in transactions rather than just with the consequences that result.

The actor-observer effect revisited: effects of individual differences and repeated social interactions on actor and observer attributions.

This research examined several factors hypothesized to influence the actor-observer effect (AOE). Participants engaged in 3 successive dyadic interactions: after each interaction, they rated the importance of 4 causal factors in influencing their behavior and that of their partner. The AOE held for 1 external factor, interaction partner, and 1 internal factor, personality, but not for situation or mood.

Omission bias and pertussis vaccination.

Background: Several laboratory studies have suggested that many people favor potentially harmful omissions over less harmful acts. The authors studied the role of this omission bias in parents' decisions whether to vaccinate their children against pertussis.

Methods: Two hundred mail surveys were sent to subscribers to a magazine that had published articles favoring and opposing pertussis vaccination.