The Medical journal of Australia
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To quantify women's uptake of Medicare Benefits Schedule mental health items, compare characteristics of women by mental health service use, and investigate the impact on Medicare costs. ⋯ Although there has been rapid uptake of mental health items, uptake by women with mental health needs is low and there is potential socioeconomic inequity.
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To examine the costs and cost-effectiveness of full implementation of biennial bowel cancer screening for Australian residents aged 50-74 years. ⋯ Full implementation of biennial faecal occult blood test screening in Australia can reduce bowel cancer mortality, and is an efficient use of health resources that would require modest additional government investment.
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Emergency departments around Australia use a range of software to capture data on patients' reason for encounter, presenting problem and diagnosis. The data collected are mainly based on descriptions and codes of the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, Australian modification (ICD-10-AM), with each emergency department having a tailored list of terms. The National E-Health Transition Authority is introducing a standard clinical terminology, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), as one of the building blocks of an e-health infrastructure in Australia. ⋯ Existing software systems need to be able to implement these reference sets to support standardised recording of data at the point of care. As the terms collected will be part of a larger terminology, they will be useful for patients' admission and discharge summaries and for computerised clinical decision making. Mapping existing sets of clinical terms to a national emergency department SNOMED CT reference set will facilitate consistency between emergency department data collections and improve the usefulness of the data for clinical and analytical purposes.