July 2012

Approximately 5% of non-elderly adults have a community acquired pneumonia (CAP) annually, with an annual total of $10.6 billion in direct and indirect costs.

Many patients stop taking medications for chronic conditions, thereby reducing the effectiveness of healthcare. An attempt to screen electronic VA healthcare records to identify patients as they discontinued a medication was not an efficient approach to this problem.

Lessons learned from implementation of a pharmacist-delivered medication therapy management intervention in primary care can inform future studies and be adopted into real-world clinical settings.

A framework for the role of pharmaceuticals in value-based healthcare, practical examples from organizations that have made the transition, and implementation considerations.

Patients with online access to key components of their personal health records were 2.6 times more likely than nonusers to remain health plan members.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 health plans to explore why plans collect or forgo race, ethnicity, and language (REL) data collection efforts, and the challenges encountered with collecting and using data for quality improvement.

Primary care physician panels vary markedly in work effort needed. Age/sex adjustment is sufficient to account for this for children, but not for adults.

Automated phone and mail population outreach resulted in an almost 4-fold increase in the rate of screening for colorectal cancer even without an office visit.

Gender differences were found in healthcare utilization in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in Germany, despite a high rate of enrollment in a disease management program.