Associations of At-Risk Drinking, Current Smoking, and Their Co-Occurrence With Primary Care Service Utilization

2021 ◽  
pp. 089011712110561
Author(s):  
John R. Moore ◽  
Yessenia Castro ◽  
Catherine Cubbin ◽  
Kirk von Sternberg

Purpose Smoking and at-risk drinking are each associated with lower primary care utilization, but the influence of their co-occurrence is not known. The current study compared associations of endorsement of one behavior vs endorsement of both with primary care utilization. Design Cross-sectional telephone survey. Setting All United States and Territories. Subjects 246 801 adults aged 18–64. Measures The outcome was endorsement of attending a past-year primary care visit. Predictor variables included drinking and smoking status examined individually and combined. Analysis Multivariable logistic regressions, adjusted for socio-demographics and number of chronic health conditions. Results The odds of attending a past-year primary care visit were 24% lower for persons who drank at risk levels compared to the odds of persons who did not drink and 36% lower for persons who smoked vs those who did not smoke. Among persons who endorsed at least one risk behavior, the odds of attending a past-year primary care visit were 25–35% lower for those who engaged in multiple behaviors compared to the odds of persons who engaged in one behavior. Conclusion Substance use screening and intervention services in primary care may not be reaching individuals with the greatest need for services. Proactive outreach and identification of primary care utilization barriers are needed, with special consideration of those with co-occurring substance use.

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 703-707
Author(s):  
Sarita Pathak ◽  
Gregory Summerville ◽  
Celia P Kaplan ◽  
Sarah S Nouri ◽  
Leah S Karliner

Participants completed a cross-sectional survey about their use of the after visit summary (AVS) at a previous primary care visit. Of 355 participants, 294 (82.8%) recalled receiving it, 67.4% consulted it, 45.9% consulted it more than once, and 31.6% shared the AVS. In multivariable analysis, higher education and older age were associated with AVS consultation. Among the subset of 133 patients recalling personalized free-text instructions, 96% found them easy to understand and 94.4% found them useful. Our findings suggest that the AVS is a useful communication tool and improvement efforts should emphasize clarity for those most vulnerable to communication errors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 175-180
Author(s):  
Margaret Nolan ◽  
Deejay Zwaga ◽  
Danielle McCarthy ◽  
Christian Kastman ◽  
Timothy Baker ◽  
...  

AbstractIntroductionMost tobacco treatment efforts target healthcare settings, because about 75% of smokers in the United States visit a primary care provider annually. Yet, 25% of patients may be missed by such targeting.AimsTo describe patients who smoke but infrequently visit primary care – their characteristics, rates of successful telephone contact, and acceptance of tobacco treatment.MethodsTobacco Cessation Outreach Specialists ‘cold-called’ those without a primary care visit in the past year, offering tobacco dependence treatment. Age, sex, insurance status, race, ethnicity, electronic health record (EHR) patient-portal status and outreach outcomes were reported.ResultsOf 3,407 patients identified as smokers in a health system registry, 565 (16.6%) had not seen any primary care provider in the past year. Among 271 of those called, 143 (53%) were successfully reached and 33 (23%) set a quit date. Those without visits tended to be younger, male, some-day versus every-day smokers (42 vs. 44 years, P = 0.004; 48% vs. 40% female, P = 0.0002, and 21% vs. 27% some-day, P = 0.003), and less active on the EHR patient portal (33% vs. 40%, P = 0.001).ConclusionsA substantial proportion of patients who smoke are missed by traditional tobacco treatment interventions that require a primary care visit, yet many are receptive to quit smoking treatment offers.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 105 (Supplement_E1) ◽  
pp. 728-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zwanziger ◽  
Dana B. Mukamel ◽  
Peter G. Szilagyi ◽  
Sarah Trafton ◽  
Andrew W. Dick ◽  
...  

Background. In response to the increase in the number of American children without health insurance, new federal and state programs have been established to expand health insurance coverage for children. However, the presence of insurance reduces the price of care for families participating in these programs and stimulates the use of medical services, which leads to an increase in health care costs. In this article, we identified the additional expenditures associated with the provision of health insurance to previously uninsured children. Methods. We estimated the expenditures on additional services using data from a study of children living in the Rochester, New York, area who were enrolled in the New York State Child Health Plus (CHPlus) program. CHPlus was designed specifically for low-income children without health insurance who were not eligible for Medicaid. The study sample consisted of 1910 children under the age of 6 who were initially enrolled in CHPlus between November 1, 1991 and August 1, 1993 and who had been enrolled for at least 9 continuous months. We used medical chart reviews to determine the level of primary care utilization, parent interviews for demographic information, as well as specialty care utilization, and we used claims data submitted to CHPlus for the year after enrollment to calculate health care expenditures. Using this information, we estimated a multivariate regression model to compute the average change in expenditures associated with a unit of utilization for a cross-section of service types while controlling for other factors that independently influenced total outpatient expenditures. Results. Expenditures for outpatient services were closely related to primary care utilization—more utilization tended to increase expenditures. Age and the presence of a chronic condition both affected expenditures. Children with chronic conditions and infants tended to have more visits, but these visits were, on average, less expensive. Applying the average change in expenditures to the change in utilization that resulted from the presence of insurance, we estimated that the total increase in expenditures associated with CHPlus was $71.85 per child in the year after enrollment, or a 23% increase in expenditures. The cost increase was almost entirely associated with the provision of primary care. Almost three-quarters of the increase in outpatient expenditures was associated with increased acute and well-child care visits. Conclusions. CHPlus was associated with a modest increase in expenditures, mostly from additional outpatient utilization. Because the additional primary care provided to young children often has substantial long-term benefits, the relatively modest expenditure increases associated with the provision of insurance may be viewed as an investment in the future.


2018 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-458
Author(s):  
Laura A. Rivera ◽  
Matthew T. Henschke ◽  
Edwin Khoo ◽  
Stanley Ing ◽  
Sandy J. Bae ◽  
...  

Cancer ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 125 (8) ◽  
pp. 1330-1340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Tsui ◽  
Derek DeLia ◽  
Antoinette M. Stroup ◽  
Jose Nova ◽  
Aishwarya Kulkarni ◽  
...  

JAMIA Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig H Ganoe ◽  
Weiyi Wu ◽  
Paul J Barr ◽  
William Haslett ◽  
Michelle D Dannenberg ◽  
...  

Abstract Objectives The objective of this study is to build and evaluate a natural language processing approach to identify medication mentions in primary care visit conversations between patients and physicians. Materials and Methods Eight clinicians contributed to a data set of 85 clinic visit transcripts, and 10 transcripts were randomly selected from this data set as a development set. Our approach utilizes Apache cTAKES and Unified Medical Language System controlled vocabulary to generate a list of medication candidates in the transcribed text and then performs multiple customized filters to exclude common false positives from this list while including some additional common mentions of the supplements and immunizations. Results Sixty-five transcripts with 1121 medication mentions were randomly selected as an evaluation set. Our proposed method achieved an F-score of 85.0% for identifying the medication mentions in the test set, significantly outperforming existing medication information extraction systems for medical records with F-scores ranging from 42.9% to 68.9% on the same test set. Discussion Our medication information extraction approach for primary care visit conversations showed promising results, extracting about 27% more medication mentions from our evaluation set while eliminating many false positives in comparison to existing baseline systems. We made our approach publicly available on the web as an open-source software. Conclusion Integration of our annotation system with clinical recording applications has the potential to improve patients’ understanding and recall of key information from their clinic visits, and, in turn, to positively impact health outcomes.


Key Points Vision screening should be a routine part of every primary care visit, with physical examination from birth and formal acuity testing from 3 years on. Elements of the physical examination include inspection, red reflex evaluation, corneal light reflection, cover-uncover test. Instrument-based testing can begin at 1 year of age until chart-based acuity testing is possible from 3 years on. Amblyopia, which results in permanent vision loss, is preventable with early detection—before 5 years of age.


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