Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz
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Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz · Jun 2004
[Public health research with statutory health insurance drug data].
Major well-organized data sources about medical services are accumulated by statutory health insurance companies. These data are sufficiently representative of drug prescriptions and constitute a potential basis for pharmacoepidemiologic research. Especially for pharmacovigilance tasks or when political decisions have to be prepared, fast and reliable answers are often necessary. ⋯ The Gesetz zur Modernisierung der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (Law on Modernization of Statutory Health Insurance Companies of 14 November 2003) will induce important progress for the development and quality of pharmacoepidemiologic research using health insurance data. Probably in the future the analysis of such data will become-in addition to analyses of other data sources such as survey data-a substantial field of pharmacoepidemiology in Germany. This article describes the background and development of using routine data from health insurance companies for scientific purposes and discusses potentials and limitations of such data for public health research.
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Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz · Feb 2004
[Assessment and certification of hospital care in Germany].
The increasing call for evaluating and certifying the quality of hospital care is to be seen in connection with the need for more transparency in the German health care system. Hospitals can have themselves evaluated or compared on four levels of quality: the level of medical, nursing, and organizational core services, the level of the quality system of the hospital, the level of the internal quality management, and the level of business excellence. ⋯ Each of them has different objectives and all are applied in German acute care hospitals. However, their methods are not yet fully developed and certainly will have to be further optimized in view of the forthcoming changes in the German health care system.
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Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz · Jan 2004
[Antibodies against vaccine-preventable diseases in pregnant women and their offspring. Measles, mumps, rubella, poliomyelitis, and varicella].
In the eastern part of Germany, the age of primigravid women has clearly increased since 1990. This may change the protection provided by antibodies in pregnant women as well as their newborns. The objective of the present study was to assess antibodies against vaccine-preventable viral infectious diseases in pregnant women and their offspring to draw conclusions about their protection. ⋯ It is suggested that the prevalence of antibodies against measles and poliomyelitis is insufficient to protect the newborns efficiently. An immunity gap of 13% against rubella in mothers results in a potential risk for a congenital rubella syndrome in newborns. Despite the high seroprevalence of rubella and chickenpox, there is considerable potential for infections during pregnancy and neonatal period.