Medical care research and review : MCRR
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The use of the hospital emergency department (ED) for nonurgent health problems has been a subject of considerable controversy, in part because there is no widely accepted definition of "nonurgent." Elimination or substantial reduction in nonurgent ED use is frequently offered as a strategy for reducing health expenditures. Previous studies, often limited to individual hospitals or communities, have limited generalizability and do not permit examination of multiple factors likely to influence nonurgent ED utilization or examination of ED use for nonurgent problems in the context of overall outpatient utilization. This analysis of the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES) provides a nationally representative examination of nonurgent ED utilization that describes the frequency of ED use for nonurgent problems, characteristics of individuals that are associated with an increased likelihood of nonurgent ED use, the use of other outpatient physician services, and expenditures associated with nonurgent ED visits.
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Surveying the literature on the assessment of quality of care from the patient's perspective, the concept has often been operationalized as patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction has been a widely investigated subject in health care research, and dozens of measuring instruments were developed during the past decade. ⋯ The authors consider patient satisfaction as an indicator of quality of care from the patient's perspective. This review is concerned with the question of whether any reliable and valid instruments have been developed to measure quality of care from the patient's perspective.