Medicaid DSRIP in New Jersey: Trade-offs between Broad Hospital Participation and Safety Net Viability.

The Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program, an increasingly utilized payment strategy to foster population health management by hospitals and outpatient providers, may sometimes generate financial and operational hardships for safety net hospitals (SNHs). The authors utilized a hospital survey and stakeholder interviews to examine impacts of the New Jersey DSRIP program, particularly focusing on its participatory structure that extended eligibility to all hospitals, and specific effects on SNHs. They found that the New Jersey DSRIP fulfilled its primary objective of conditioning receipt of Medicaid supplementary payments on quality and reporting of care by hospitals.

Association of faculty perceptions of work-life with emotional exhaustion and intent to leave academic nursing: report on a national survey of nurse faculty.

The current and projected nurse faculty shortage threatens the capacity to educate sufficient numbers of nurses for meeting demand. As part of an initiative to foster strategies for expanding educational capacity, a survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,120 full-time nurse faculty members in 269 schools and programs that offered at least one prelicensure degree program was conducted. Nearly 4 of 10 participants reported high levels of emotional exhaustion, and one third expressed an intent to leave academic nursing within 5 years.

Patient preference for emergency care: can and should it be changed?

The authors use a statewide survey to examine care seeking behavior in the emergency department (ED). Most patients who go to the ED (69.3%) do so mainly for conditions they believe are urgent.

Implications of the growing use of wireless telephones for health care opinion polls.

Objective: To assess the effect of wireless telephone substitution in a survey of health care reform opinions.

Data Source: Survey of New Jersey adults conducted by landline and wireless telephones from June 1 to July 9, 2007.

Study Design: Eighty-one survey measures are compared by wireless status.

The adequacy of household survey data for evaluating the nongroup health insurance market.

Objective: To evaluate the accuracy of household survey estimates of the size and composition of the nonelderly population covered by nongroup health insurance.

Data Sources/study Setting: Health insurance enrollment statistics reported to New Jersey insurance regulators. Household data from the following sources: the 2002 Current Population Survey (CPS)-March Demographic Supplement, the 1997 and 1999 National Surveys of America's Families (NSAF), the 2001 New Jersey Family Health Survey (NJFHS), a 2002 survey of known nongroup health insurance enrollees, a small 2004 survey testing alternative health insurance question wording.

Cholesterol control, medication adherence and illness cognition.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the relation between illness cognitions and two measures of adherence in patients with hypercholesterolaemia, a disease marked by chronically high cholesterol. DESIGN: Cross-sectional. Based on the self-regulation model (Leventhal, Diefenbach, & Leventhal, 1992), patients' illness cognitions were predicted to be related to cholesterol control and medication adherence.

Giving up and replacing activities in response to illness.

Data from a longitudinal study of 250 older adults were used to examine activity loss and replacement as a consequence of an important illness episode. Multiple regression analyses revealed that reductions in activity were predicted by physical factors, specifically illness chronicity and severity. In contrast, replacing lost activities was facilitated by social support and optimism and inhibited by a belief in the need to conserve physical resources.