This article describes 3 approaches to improving diabetes care in a health maintenance organisation (HMO) setting. The first approach was to identify which patients had not received a dilated eye examination in the past year, notify both them and their physician, and provide each with...

Disease management initiatives are becoming increasingly popular in the US as a way for managed-care plans to care for their members with chronic conditions. Diabetes is one of the most expensive chronic conditions, both in terms of human lives and actual healthcare costs. Managed-care plans are...

The objective of this study was to develop, and subsequently test, a Bayesian discrimination model for the purpose of identifying both the personal and the healthcare system characteristics predictive of hospitalisation for the treatment of patients with diabetes mellitus or commonly observed...

Prevention and long term disease management have been added relatively recently as `new' components of a modern day total healthcare services system. The goal of primary prevention, which includes medical preventive services, lifestyle interventions and screening services, is to maintain a...

The first edition of the Guidelines for Economic Evaluation of Pharmaceuticals: Canada was published in November 1994. At that time, the Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment (CCOHTA) was assigned the task of maintaining and regularly updating the Canadian Guidelines....

As total healthcare spending increases throughout the world, greater emphasis is being placed on research which demonstrates value for medical interventions, including new and existing pharmaceuticals. Pharmacoeconomic evaluations can assist manufacturers, insurers, clinicians, governmental...

This paper outlines recent advances in the methods of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Economic evaluations in healthcare can be criticised for, amongst other things, the inappropriate use of incremental cost-effectiveness ratios and the reporting of benefits in terms of cost savings, such as...

Specific regulatory guidelines dictate that developing a new drug for osteoporosis will be significantly more expensive and take at least 2 years longer in comparison with other long-term therapies developed using the International Committee on Harmonisation (ICH) general guidelines. Assuming...

Because of the extensive burden that diabetes mellitus imposes on individuals and healthcare systems, this disease state is frequently on the priority lists of managed-care organisations for improving quality of care while controlling costs. This article explains diabetes disease management...

Objective: The main objective of this study was to evaluate treatment patterns and to assess the relationship between diabetes mellitus-related vascular complications and the total medical/prescription drug costs in the elderly population using a large, national, self-insured employer database....