Research Activities

March/April 1998, No. 214

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Contents

About Research Activities

Feature Story

Fewer than half of schizophrenia patients get proper treatment

Departments

Smoking Cessation
   Physician counseling can help patients quit smoking
   More intensive smoking cessation efforts by clinicians could greatly increase the number of smokers who quit each year
   People who quit smoking are much less likely to be hospitalized than those who continue to smoke

Health Care Delivery
   Specialists see more privately insured patients than HMO patients
   Organized system of care may improve management of diabetes and other chronic diseases

Clinical Decisionmaking
   Amiodarone reduces deaths by up to 20 percent in patients at risk for sudden cardiac death
   Clinicians advised to reconsider routine use of antibiotics for acute ear infections
   Early bone marrow transplantation is recommended for most patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia

Outcomes/Effectiveness Research
   Prostate PORT publishes recent findings
   Cardiologists use more intensive treatments for heart attack patients than generalist physicians
   Studies on the effects of health care organizational changes on clinical outcomes deserve high research priority
   Conference attendees examine the impact of changes in nursing care on health care delivery and patient outcomes

Health Care Costs and Financing
   Millions of American children still lack health insurance and face barriers to care
   More aggressive diagnostic protocols for suspected heart attack can reduce unnecessary hospitalizations

Medical Liability
   Malpractice claims for physician omission are both less common and more likely to be paid than other malpractice suits

Elderly/Long-term Care
   Use of physical restraints in nursing homes has declined, but the same types of residents are being restrained
   Physiological measures alone are insufficient to assess treatment impact for chronic diseases like Alzheimer's
   Studies focus on measuring quality in long-term care

Minority Health
   Spanish-speaking Latinos report better health outcomes when their doctors also speak Spanish
   Poor black and white patients use different reference points in evaluating their health status

Dental Research
   Researchers focus attention on children's dental health

Data Development and Use
   Researchers describe use of large databases to measure outcomes of care

AHCPR News and Notes
   From the Administrator: Purchasers look to health services research for the information they need in today's market-driven health care arena
   AHCPR encourages researchers to submit applications

Announcements
   AHCPR, CDC, AAHP, and the HMO Research Network to host the fourth annual "Building Bridges" conference
   Registry of State-level efforts to integrate health data can be found on the Internet
   New report describes ways to evaluate performance, improve patient care, and operate more efficiently
   NMES data now available on a single CD-ROM
   Calling all AHCPR Web site users

Research Briefs
   Measurement properties of the short multidimensional observation scale for elderly subjects (MOSES)
   The virtual visit: Using telecommunications technology to take care of patients
   A WWW implementation of national recommendations for protecting electronic health information
   Effectiveness and cost of rapid and conventional laboratory methods for Mycobacterium tuberculosis screening
   Methodological issues in linking costs and health outcomes in research on differing care delivery systems
   Comparison of two surveys of hospitalizations
   Utilization and cost of serologic tests for Lyme disease in Maryland

AHCPR Publication No. 98-0019
Current as of March 1998

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Internet Citation:

Research Activities newsletter. March/April 1998, No. 214. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/research/mar98/

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