MedGenMed : Medscape general medicine
-
To compare utilization of emergency department (ED) and inpatient resources for asthmatics across insurance types. ⋯ Significant differences in types and costs of care were observed across differing insurance types, which may suggest an "insurance effect" on asthma-related treatment in the ED and/or hospital.
-
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) seeks to improve clinical practice by evaluating the quality of clinical evidence and ensuring that only the "best" evidence from clinical research is used in the management of individual patients. EBM has contributed to our understanding of the meaning of the benefit and harm of treatment as reported in the literature, and it is often promoted as an aid to clinical decision making. However, EBM therapeutic summary measures reflect only a single dimension of clinical decision making. The purpose of this work is to show how EBM therapeutic summary measures can be effectively incorporated into medical decision making. ⋯ In the setting of clinical decision making, EBM summary measures derived from population studies can be effectively used to define diagnostic and therapeutic action thresholds that may help in the management of individual patients.