Published in Medical Care
Background: Relative costs of care among treatment options for opioid use disorder (OUD) are unknown. Methods: We identified a cohort of 40,885 individuals with a new diagnosis of OUD in a large national de-identified claims database covering commercially insured and Medicare Advantage enrollees. We assigned individuals to 1 of 6 mutually exclusive...
Published in Medical Care
Veterans Health Administration (VHA) launched a national initiative to train providers in a specific, protocolized auricular acupuncture treatment (also called Battlefield Acupuncture or BFA) as a nonpharmacological approach to pain management. This evaluation assessed the real-world effectiveness of BFA on immediate pain relief and identified subg...
Published in Medical Care
Nonpharmacological options to treat pain are in demand, in part to address the opioid crisis. One such option is acupuncture. Battlefield acupuncture (BFA) is an auricular needling protocol currently used to treat pain in the Veterans Health Administration. We aimed to identify the advantages and disadvantages of BFA from providers’ perspectives. M...
Published in Medical Care
Veterans Health Administration encourages auricular acupuncture (Battlefield Acupuncture/BFA) as a nonpharmacologic approach to pain management. Qualitative reports highlighted a “gateway hypothesis”: providing BFA can lead to additional nonpharmacologic treatments. This analysis examines subsequent use of traditional acupuncture. Research Design: ...
Published in Medical Care
Background: A key goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase health insurance coverage for people with chronic disease. Little is known about progress toward this goal over the first 5 years of ACA implementation. Objective: The objective of this study was to assess changes in coverage for nonelderly adults with an...
Published in Medical Care
Background: Increases in prescription drug cost-sharing may decrease adherence to treatment among persons with schizophrenia and lead to discontinuation of use and an increased risk of hospitalization. Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of new deductible and increased drug copayments implemented on antipsychotic an...
Published in Medical Care
Published in Medical Care
Published in Medical Care
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) cares for more patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) than any other US health care system. We tracked the implementation strategies that VA sites used to implement highly effective new treatments for HCV with the aim of uncovering how combinations of implementation strategies influenced the uptake of the HCV ...
Published in Medical Care
It is important to be able to estimate the anticipated net population benefit if the performance of hospitals is improved to specific standards. Objective: The objective of this study was to show how G-computation can be used with random effects logistic regression models to estimate the absolute reduction in the number of adverse events if the per...
