Health maintenance organization clinic, clinical

Cynthia Marshall is a pharmacist who works at a closed-staff-model health maintenance organization (HMO) pharmacy. Pharmacists at this clinic have access to patient charts that can be used to supplement information given by the patient to the pharmacy staff and what is written... 

In this case, about half of the data desired were available electronically, most of which were related to health as heavily weighted toward economic information. To gather the remaining desired data the investigators needed to collect prospectively humanistic as well as some additional clinical variables (Hirsch and Van Den Eeden, 1997). It is quite typical that clinical data available electronically are often not complete and therefore not very useful, and that humanistic data are missing completely from the databases held by Health Maintenance Organizations. 

Witt, D.M. Tillman, D.J. Clinical pharmacy anticoagulation services in a group model health maintenance organization. Pharm. Pract. Manage. Q. 1998, 18 (3), 34-55. 

The term health care institution shall include any hospital, convalescent hospital, health maintenance organization, health clinic, nursing home, extended care facility, or other institution devoted to the care of sick, infirm, or aged person. 

I was not involved in clinical research initially as a career. I was a medical records analyst/correspondent for a family practice health maintenance organization (HMO). A friend told me about the position, I applied, and here I am, nine years later. I am now responsible for large-scale respiratory studies within oncology, dealing with physician-initiated and industrial clinical trials. 

There are numerous systems where the infinite server principal-agent model is relevant. Cachon and Harker (1999) provide two nice examples, one in PC banking and one in DelTs customer service. A third example is in health services where Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO) or government insurance agencies outsource the delivery of clinical services to specialized providers, and they wish to structure incentive contracts that will motivate the private providers to adopt cost-effective clinical decisions that maximize patient survival (Zweifel and Breyer, 1997). 

Physician assistants can work in clinics, hospitals, health maintenance organizations, private practices, or take on a more administrative role that involves hiring new PAs and acting as a representative for the hospital and patient. 

A related issue in pharmacoeconomics trials is the generalizability of the health care delivery system of the patients in the study. A pharmacoeco-nomic study conducted through health a maintenance organization using its members as subjects may observe less referrals to specialist physicians than would the same clinical study in a different practice setting. This effect may be even more pronounced in multinational clinical trials, in which health care systems, physician education, and patients expectations for treatment differ by country. 

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