Pay-for-performance schemes share the common approach of offering financial incentives to healthcare providers for achieving specified performance targets. Such schemes are becoming increasingly popular with healthcare policy makers and funders worldwide, despite a relative lack of evidence on...

The rapid expansion of disease management continues. A multitude of stakeholders and marketplaces are now involved in providing cost effective quality healthcare for individuals and populations. To help you keep up-to-date with the very latest developments in disease management, this section of...

Objective: To assess the efficacy of a World Wide Web-enabled asthma self-management intervention on quality-of-life indicators among self-selected participants with asthma. Design: A quasi-experimental design was used in which quality-of-life outcome indicators were derived from the Mini Asthma...

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases of adults and children in industrialized countries, and has had a marked increase in prevalence over the past 25 years. Asthma disproportionately affects under-represented minority populations, with African Americans and (some) Hispanics having...

A variety of program evaluation designs are available to assess the impact of disease or care management programs, which can make it difficult to compare outcomes of different interventions. The need to compare programs has resulted in consideration of standardizing evaluations of disease...

Diabetic retinopathy is a significant cause of visual loss in developed countries. Data from epidemiological studies and controlled clinical trials have resulted in treatment strategies, which are highly successful in preventing blindness. These strategies involve measures that require both...

The burden of cardiovascular disease in America continues to be the leading cause of death and costs significantly more to treat ($US298.2 billion in 2002) than any other disease in the US healthcare system. Incontrovertible evidence links elevated levels of total and low-density...