An empirical puzzle has emerged over the last several decades of research on variation in clinical decision making involving mixed effects of physician experience. There is some evidence that physicians with greater experience may provide poorer quality care than their less experienced...

Objectives To (1) examine the influence of patient and provider attributes on physicians' diagnostic certainty and (2) assess the effect of diagnostic certainty on clinical therapeutic actions.Methods Factorial experiment of 128 generalist physicians using identical clinically authentic...

Primary health care is essential to population health and there is increasing need for it, especially with an aging population with multiple comorbidities. Primary health care in the U.S. is widely considered in an ever-deepening crisis. This paper presents a detailed case study of the recent...

Providing a good patient experience is a key part of providing high-quality medical care. This paper explains why patient experience is important in its own right, and its relationship to other domains of quality. We describe methods of measuring patient experience, including issues relating to...

Much emphasis is now being placed on the quality of medical care, and various ways are being developed to assess the medical knowledge of general practitioners. It is increasingly recognised that the users perspective on health care is important, and that the views of health care professionals...

In recent decades, an interdisciplinary quality assurance (QA) movement has emerged in health care studies, which has included increased attention to medical errors. Implicit in this QA effort is a conflict between (1) external agents encouraging the medical profession to adopt strategies for...

The focus of health promotion is moving from the level of individuals to organizations, communities and broader social policy. Traditional quantitative methods (e.g. social surverys and experimental designs) which are variously appropriate at the level of individual behavior change require...

The objective of this study was to determine whether assertive patient behavior influences physician decision-making in the treatment of older breast cancer patients. One hundred and twenty-eight physicians saw videotapes depicting women seeking care for breast cancer and then recommended...

Although research in the past twenty years has resulted in an increasingly sophisticated understanding of clinical decision making processes, the dominant approach in this area of inquiry remains limited. Most studies emphasize normative models of how decisions ought to be made, others attempt...