Emergency health services system patient access

These realities of the current state of healthcare have caused healthcare policy-makers to use several methods to regulate the supply and demand of health services and thereby control the cost of those serv ices. Attempts to reduce the supply of services include a reduction in the reimbursement for services or a reduction in the number of physicians and specialists. These approaches may contain the growth of healthcare costs but a reduction in the capacity of the healthcare system also limits the patient access to services, resulting in longer waits for non-emergency services. Attempts to reduce the demand for services include ... 

As pertinent variables are identified, it will become clear that some data will be easily obtainable, whereas information on other variables will be extremely difficult to acquire. Pharmacy-related data often are easily retrievable because much of the information can be obtained directly from the pharmacy s prescription computer program (and the patient profiles). Patient demographic information such as gender and age generally is also stored on the pharmacy computer. However, depending on the research question, data from other areas of the health care system may need to be collected as well. For instance, one hypothesis could be that a pharmacy service may result in a reduction in emergency department visits. Pharmacists often do not have access to data on emergency department visits in their own records. 

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