Cardiac rehabilitation has been shown to improve exercise tolerance and symptomatology in patients experiencing angina or heart failure and reduce long term mortality after myocardial infarction, with a good cost-effectiveness ratio. In addition to these `hard' endpoints, cardiac rehabilitation...

The management of breast cancer is a significant public health issue. Early detection of breast cancer through screening mammography, physician clinical examination and breast self-examination can reduce breast cancer mortality by approximately 30%. Most major health organisations agree that...

Schizophrenia is a chronic disease that typically manifests during adolescence and early adulthood. Treatment of this disease consumes a significant proportion of the healthcare budget (billions of dollars in the US). Primary management options for schizophrenia include both pharmacologic and...

Growing concern about the rapid emergence of penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae, as well as beta-lactamase-mediated resistance among Haemophilus influenzae and Moraxella catarrhalis, has lead to reconsideration of the management of acute otitis media in children. Acute otitis media is...

Patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have poor survival prospects, as most have advanced disease at diagnosis. Chemotherapy can be used to treat these patients if their performance status is good, although there are geographical differences in chemotherapy use. Combination...

Influenza remains a significant cause of worldwide morbidity and mortality. With the availability of new effective antivirals for the treatment of influenza, early diagnosis of the disease will become increasingly important for effective disease management. Although investigators are generally...

Healthcare professionals are increasingly held accountable for the standards of care that they provide. The focus of control for this accountability can be either internal or external activity to the professional body and can use implicit or explicit quality assessment techniques. The science of...

Purpose: To examine factors associated with HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor (statin) management and the effect of therapeutic modifications on patients' abilities to reach their low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) goal in a sample of managed care enrollees. Methods: This retrospective...

Most pharmacoeconomic studies of mycophenolate mofetil have focused on its use as part of maintenance immunosuppression for renal transplantation, involving short-term (3-12 months) time frames. In general, mycophenolate mofetil reduced the treatment costs for rejection episodes and graft...

Increasingly, primary care physicians are being given budgets based on capitation formulae in the belief that such budgets will be fairer than budgets based on the historical utilization of funds. A second reason for giving primary care physicians budgets based on capitation formulae is that...