Clinical audit as a tool to optimize contracted private healthcare provision: Testing the waters in resource-deprived Greece.

Background And Aims: Clinical audit is applied to optimize clinical practice and quality of healthcare services while controlling for money spent, critically in resource-deprived settings. This case study reports on the outcomes of a retrospective clinical audit on private hospitalizations, for which reimbursement had been pending by the Health Care Organization for Public Servants (OPAD) in Greece. This case study is the first effort by a social insurance organization in Greece to employ external clinical audit before settling contracted private healthcare charges.

Proposal for the Implementation of Quality Standards in a Medical Unit Through Integration to the Hospital Information System.

Quality standards (QS) support and enhance health care services provided to patients and citizens, especially in sophisticated medical departments, such as Intensive Care Units (ICU). However, ICU staff lag behind in the adoption and compliance of QS protocols. In this paper, QS protocols implemented in the Intensive Care Unit of the Attiko University Hospital, a tertiary teaching hospital of the University of Athens, will be discussed.

E-prescribing in Greece: myth or reality.

The economic crisis, as well as the need to improve patient safety, enhance healthcare services and reduce medical costs made Greek payers to support the implementation and usage of a national electronic prescribing system. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate physicians' attitudes towards e-Prescribing for suggesting improvements. Despite the fact that the physicians were generally satisfied with the e-prescribing system, the benefits of its use were not realized.

Transforming Public Servants' Health Care Organization in Greece through the Implementation of an Electronic Referral Project.

Objective: The Greek Public Servants' Health Care Organization aiming to organize, monitor, and enhance the health care services provided to 1,500,000 public servants decided to respond to the national alert of the economic crisis through the reduction of costs caused by diagnostic tests (€300,000,000 claims for 2008), to improve working conditions of contracted physicians and laboratories, and to enhance services provided to insured members. In September 2010, the Greek Public Servants' Health Care Organization initiated a pilot project that electronically records the prescription process of the diagnostic tests, which is Web-based, is open source, and was provided for free to the contracted physicians and diagnostic centers.

Methods: In this article, we present some interesting findings resulting from the implementation of the pilot electronic referral project by examining a 9-month period.

The relevance of peripheral blood T-helper 1 and 2 cytokine pattern in the evaluation of patients with mycosis fungoides and Sézary syndrome.

Background: There is evidence that a T-helper (Th) 2 cytokine pattern dominates in the peripheral blood as well as in tissue of patients with Sézary syndrome (SS), and that the malignant clone is of Th2 phenotype. However, there are conflicting studies on the cytokine pattern in the peripheral blood in different stages of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL).

Objectives: To examine, by means of flow cytometry (FC), the Th1/Th2 cytokine profile [cytoplasmic interferon (IFN)-gamma/interleukin (IL)-4] in peripheral blood T cells from patients with mycosis fungoides (MF) and SS, the most common forms of CTCL, and to correlate their expression with clinical stage, clonality and T-cell immunophenotype changes in order to evaluate their relevance in CTCL progression.