Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making
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: Many studies are presented at scientific meetings and are summarized in abstract form prior to their full-length publication. Publication rates of these studies may be an indicator in judging their quality. ⋯ : A significant proportion of studies presented at the SMDM meeting are not published in full length. This failure to publish is substantially higher as compared with findings from other medical and biomedical meetings. A further study is needed to explore the reasons for this low publication rate and to compare the fate of SMDM meeting abstracts to those of similar conferences.
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Social marketing uses commercial marketing strategies to change individual and organizational behavior and policies. It has been effective on a population level across a wide range of public health and health care domains. There is limited evidence of the effectiveness of social marketing in changing health care consumer behavior through its impact on patient-provider interaction or provider behavior. ⋯ Pharmaceutical industry marketing practices offer valuable lessons for developing competing messages to reach providers and consumers. Social marketing is an effective population-based behavior change strategy that can be applied in individual clinical settings and as a complement to reinforce messages communicated on a population level. There is a need for more research on message strategies that work in health care and population-level effectiveness studies.
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Health-state utilities are essential for cost-utility analysis. Few estimates exist for liver disease in the literature. The authors' aim was to conduct a systematic review of health-state utilities in liver disease, to look at the variation of study designs used, and to pool utilities for some liver disease states. ⋯ The authors have created a valuable liver disease- based utility resource from which researchers and policy makers can easily view all available utility estimates from the literature. They have also estimated health-state utilities for major states of hepatitis C.
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When a patient is too incapacitated to make important end-of-life decisions, doctors may ask a preappointed surrogate to predict the patient's preferences and make decisions on the patient's behalf. The current study investigates whether surrogates project their own views onto what they predict the patients' preferences are. ⋯ When surrogates inaccurately predict the CPR v. DNR and extend life v. relieve pain preferences of seriously ill, hospitalized loved ones, surrogates' prediction errors often represent surrogates' own wishes for the patient.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report quality of care for patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), congestive heart failure (CHF), and community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) with the intention of rewarding superior performing hospitals. The aim of the study was to compare identification of superior hospitals for providing financial rewards using 2 different scoring systems: a latent score that weights individual clinical performance measures according to how well each discriminated hospital quality and a raw sum score (the system adopted by CMS). ⋯ Neither the AMI raw sum score nor latent score discriminates hospital quality due to ceiling effects. Current methods for aggregating measures result in different hospital superior designations than those based on the latent score. Organizations that financially reward hospitals on the basis of such scores need to assess predictive validity of scores and determine a minimum level of classification accuracy.