A Community Health Information Network (CHIN) is a web-based net of computer systems which allows the electronic exchange of clinical, financial and administrative information among unaffiliated healthcare entities in order to improve the efficiency and delivery of healthcare in the community....

Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the US rapidly increased from $US150 million in 1992 to $US1.2 billion in 1998 (to the end of November). Despite this level of expenditure, there is no literature on how DTCA affects patients' level of knowledge about medications, physician...

Healthcare institutions, such as hospitals, are made up of highly distributed and complex organizational structures and processes. As such there is an increasingly large number of information interfaces between various involved healthcare professionals, making efficient organization of patient...

Many health maintenance organisations (HMOs) and provider organisations are developing disease management programmes to improve quality of care and lower costs for patients with chronic diseases. Many of these organisations ultimately decide to outsource these programmes to vendors rather than...

Introduction: Influenza is associated with illnesses such as pneumonia and other respiratory conditions and in severe cases leads to death. The prevalence of these illnesses and deaths fluctuates with the seasons during the year, even in the absence of influenza. Although many studies have...

Objective: To determine the clinical effectiveness of a standardised behavioural medicine group intervention when implemented by different group leaders in 7 geographically diverse healthcare organisations (HCOs). Design: This study used longitudinal data collected for quality assurance...

If the disease management industry succeeds in producing effective solutions to many of the problems besetting today's healthcare delivery systems (such as misalignment of financial and care incentives, poor customer service, failure to provide useful preventative care, and a dearth of empirical...

Care for older people with dementia living in the community involves not only a physician and the patient, but also a family member as the `primary caregiver'. This caregiver communicates medical information from the physician to the patient (screening this information as necessary), ensures...

With emerging access to the Internet and valuable healthcare resources online, healthcare consumers have quickly adopted the World Wide Web as a resource for healthcare information. Because growing numbers of consumers are accessing healthcare information online, it is important to explore how...