David N. Sundwall

Public Health Surveillance and Meaningful Use Regulations: A Crisis of Opportunity

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act is intended to enhance reimbursement of health care providers for meaningful use of electronic health records systems. This presents both opportunities and challenges for public health departments. To earn incentive payments, clinical providers must exchange specified types of data with the public health system, such as immunization and syndromic surveillance data and notifiable disease reporting. However, a crisis looms because public healths information technology systems largely lack the capabilities to accept the types of data proposed for exchange. Cloud computing may be a solution for public health information systems. Through shared computing resources, public health departments could reap the benefits of electronic reporting within federal funding constraints.

Patient preferences for healthcare delivery through community pharmacy settings in the USA: A discrete choice study

In order to improve public health, it is necessary to facilitate patients’ easy access to affordable high‐quality primary health care, and one enhanced approach to do so may be to provide primary healthcare services in the community pharmacy setting. Discrete choice experiments to evaluate patient demand for services in pharmacy are relatively limited and have been hampered by a focus on only a few service alternatives, most focusing on changes in more traditional pharmacy services. The study aim was to gauge patient preferences explicitly for primary healthcare services that could be delivered through community pharmacy settings in the USA, using a very large sample to accommodate multiple service delivery options.

Estimating the Budgetary Impact of Setting the Medicare Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule at the National Limitation Amount

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences was commissioned by Congress to study the current system for the payment of diagnostic clinical laboratory services provided to Medicare beneficiaries. The current system was established in 1984 and has grown in complexity and is of diminishing contemporary relevance. The IOM recommended that a single, rational, nationalfee schedule be established and that it be initially based on the National Limitation Amount (NLA) currently mandated as the national fee cap. To estimate the potential budgetary impact of this recommendation, we merged the 1999 Part B Extract and Summary System and the 1999 Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory Fee Schedule (CLFS). By using an estimated 193 million allowed services from this data set and the current mean fee of

So Now What

9.14 per test, current spending is approximately

Integrating Family Medicine and Community Pharmacy to Improve Patient Access to Quality Primary Care and Enhance Health Outcomes

1,768 million. The impact of raising the CLFS to the NLA will be approximately

Health Care Systems and National Policy: Role of Leadership in the Obesity Crisis

1,792 million, or

Lenert and Sundwall Respond

9.26 per test. The estimated cumulative budgetary effect, factoring in the current forecast for the Consumer Price Index, is an increase of approximately

Predictors of patient adherence to follow-up recommendations after an ED visit

993 million over 5 years and

Public Health Advocacy in the Tumultuous Times of the Trump Administration

2,359 million over 10 years.

Areas of concern for public health

The author reflects on various aspects of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) as of 2016, and it mentions public health practices and principles in America, as well as political polarization in the country and efforts to improve the health of everyone in the U.S. According to the article, the primary purpose of the ACA is to increase the number of Americans with health insurance. The 2016 U.S. presidential election and ACA-related amendments are assessed.