housecalls

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The need for primary medical care in the home will increase with a growing elderly and disabled population. The effectiveness of the service must be assessed in light of its relatively high costs. The aim of this study was to evaluate VNA HouseCalls of Greater Cleveland, Ohio during its first year of operations. The program targets high-risk older adults using teams of advanced practice nurses and physicians. The pilot evaluation focused on the attainment of identified program goals. Data collection techniques included clinical record review (N = 139), mailed referral source satisfaction survey, and both mailed and telephone interview patient satisfaction surveys...

OBJECTIVE: To determine family physicians' availability to their general practice patients after hours and to explore the characteristics and determinants of after-hours services. DESIGN: Secondary analysis of the 2001 National Family Physician Workforce Survey. SETTING: Canada. PARTICIPANTS: Canadian family physicians and general practitioners currently in practice (n = 10,553). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Provision of after-hours care, defined as providing care to all practice patients outside of normal office hours...

Carbon monoxide poisoning is not easily identifiable. It is the first cause of death by accidental poisoning in Europe. The family practitioner, who has not been made aware of this problem, incurs the risk of diagnostic indecision or of involuntary personal poisoning. Since symptomatology is non specific, the general practitioner answering housecalls is sometimes confronted with an urgent medical problem linked to the complications of this intoxication (coronary, neurological problems...), without having ways of documenting its origin of the poisoning or any means to protect himself...

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This article examines how the role of a physician housecall program is perceived by health and social service providers that refer their clients to the program in a Midwest suburban community. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews with those providers revealed various housecall service needs of their homebound clients. In particular, the fact that home health agencies were the largest referral source suggests that the housecall program fills the needs that are not met by the current mainstream home health services...

OBJECTIVE: To compare characteristics of family physicians planning to discontinue or stay in intrapartum care. DESIGN: Self-administered questionnaire. SETTING: Department of Family Practice at Children's and Women's Health Centre of British Columbia. PARTICIPANTS: Ninety-five family physicians who attended at least one birth at the Health Centre between April 1997 and August 1998. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Intention to leave or stay in family practice maternity care, physician characteristics and beliefs...

OBJECTIVE: To understand how elderly patients think about and approach future illness and the end of life. DESIGN: Qualitative study conducted 1997-9. SETTING: Physician housecall programme affiliated to US university. PARTICIPANTS: 20 chronically ill housebound patients aged over 75 years who could participate in an interview. Participants identified through purposive and random sampling. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: In-depth semistructured interviews lasting one to two hours...

A working group on teaching palliative care in the home was convened at The National Consensus Conference on Medical Education for Care Near the End of Life. Our consensus statement includes: (1) a justification for education in the home; (2) general guidelines about teaching palliative care at this site; (3) identification of major barriers to training in the home, and some suggestions for overcoming these barriers; and (4) specific suggestions about how and what to teach. We find that the home is an excellent site for training in comprehensive palliative medicine...

OBJECTIVE: To describe the scope of home care and to give practical advice for incorporating home visits into family practice. QUALITY OF EVIDENCE: Most of the literature is based on expert opinion, but there are some randomized trials and well done surveys. MAIN MESSAGE: Although physicians make fewer housecalls than they used to, home visiting is essential to providing good care to certain patients. An approach to evaluating patients and their home environments is presented...

OBJECTIVE: To describe the characteristics of home health care delivered by general practitioners and to identify the conditions that facilitate or hinder development of this practice. DESIGN: Mailed survey. SETTING: Quebec city region. PARTICIPANTS: General practitioners in private practice, family practice units, community health centres, or hospitals. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather information on volume of home care provided, characteristics of clients and visits, methods of follow up, and factors that promoted or hindered home care...

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BACKGROUND: The idea of using telemedical applications to evaluate patients remotely is several decades old. It has already been established that x-ray images (and magnetic resonance images) can be transferred using a personal computer and a modem, and many other such applications have been implemented. Over the past 50 years the expense and technical demands of the equipment involved in telemedicine have hindered its widespread deployment. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the ability of a mobile, low-bandwidth telemedicine platform to achieve real-time postoperative visits in the home...

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The marriage of all the emotional and convenience factors making preference for housecalls over space-age technology allows several processes to take shape. First, physicians can now be comfortable in having a complete database on which to make clinical decisions in the home. Secondly, continuity and quality of care questions can be laid to rest. Finally, given adequate volume, physician-owned services can generate sufficient revenues to entice more providers into the home care arena.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The changes in reimbursement structure in health care have given rise to a rapidly growing focus on the consumer and this recent increase has been fueled by the advent of the Web. Consumer health information (CHI) systems empower the consumer and aim to improve doctor-patient communication. We present HouseCall, a CHI system. First, this paper reviews how a consumer information system can be derived from an existing physician knowledge base (Iliad). Second, it presents evaluation studies that: 1) show how consumers are eager for non 'dumbed-down' content with easy access, 2) demonstrate the large spectrum of topics of interest and the 'natural' search strategies of health care consumers...

Providing oral health care to older adults will be a challenging and rewarding part of dental practice in the years ahead. It will include understanding normal aging, appreciation of the pathophysiology of chronic diseases experienced by many elderly, and application of key principles of pharmacology in care of patients receiving medications for treatment of these diseases. It will involve an understanding of the interaction of systemic conditions with oral health status, adequate diagnosis of oral disease, and appropriate rational treatment planning with a strong emphasis on preventive dentistry...

A study carried out by the Basic Health Area (ABS) in the neighborhood known as Nord Raval in Barcelona focused on the detection of household risk factors on patients cared for by this health center. This project received a grant from the Health Investigation Fund (FIS) in 1996, file number 96/0820. This project has three parts spread out over a three-year period. This first part, which has now been finished, consisted of a survey of neighborhood residents over 65 years old to determine if accident risk factors exist in their homes...