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To describe treatment patterns, outcomes and healthcare resource use in patients with metastatic and/or locally recurrent, unresectable gastric cancer (MGC) in Taiwan.Patients who had received first-line therapy (platinum and/or fluoropyrimidine) followed by second-line therapy or best supportive care (BSC) only were eligible. Participating physicians provided de-identified information from patient charts. Data were summarized descriptively and Kaplan-Meier analysis was used to describe time to events.Overall, 37 physicians contributed 122 patient charts. Of the 122 patients (median age, 61 years; 62% male), 43 (35%) received BSC only following first-line therapy, whereas 79 (65%) received second-line therapy. There was heterogeneity in second-line treatment, although fluoropyrimidine with or without a platinum agent was most frequently used. Median survival was 12.5 (interquartile range [IQR], 8.2-20.8) months from MGC diagnosis for patients receiving second-line therapy and 8.0 (IQR, 5.6-not reached) months for patients receiving BSC only. The most common treatment-related symptoms were nausea/vomiting (58%); the most common cancer-related symptoms were pain (61%), ascites (35%) and nausea/vomiting (33%). Inpatient and outpatient hospitalizations were numerically more common for patients receiving second-line therapy than for those receiving BSC only; the prevalence of hospice and skilled nursing facility stays were numerically more common for patients receiving BSC only.In this Taiwanese MGC population, 65% received active second-line therapy with heterogeneity seen in the regimen used. Clinical outcomes suggest an unmet medical need in this population. This study may help inform clinical practice and future research to ultimately improve patient outcomes in Taiwan.

Prescription opioid abuse and addiction are serious problems with growing societal and medical costs, resulting in billions of dollars of excess costs to private and governmental health insurers annually. Although difficult to accurately assess, prescription opioid abuse also leads to increased insurance costs in the form of property and liability claims, and costs to state and local governments for judicial, emergency, and social services. This manuscript's objective is to provide payers with strategies to control these costs, while supporting safe use of prescription opioid medications for patients with chronic pain.A Tufts Health Care Institute Program on Opioid Risk Management meeting was convened in June 2010 with private and public payer representatives, public health and law enforcement officials, pain specialists, and other stakeholders to present research and develop recommendations on solutions that payers might implement to combat this problem.While protecting access to prescription opioids for patients with pain, private and public payers can implement strategies to mitigate financial risks associated with opioid abuse, using internal strategies such as formulary controls, claims data surveillance, and claims matching; and external policies and procedures that support and educate physicians on reducing opioid risks among patients with chronic pain.Reimbursement policies, incentives, and health technology systems that encourage physicians to use universal precautions, to consult prescription monitoring program (PMP) data, and to implement Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment protocols have a high potential to reduce insurer risks while addressing a serious public health problem.

Individuals with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) utilize more health care services and are significantly more costly. Drug treatments for TRD may include concomitant administration of multiple antidepressants or augmentation with mood stabilizers or antipsychotic agents. An augmentation strategy currently under investigation is the use of an olanzapine plus fluoxetine combination (OFC) therapy. The objectives for this pilot study were to use claims data to: (1) describe the extent of current use of OFC in patients with depressive disorders, and (2) compare health care utilization patterns and medical costs of patients receiving fluoxetine therapy before and after the initiation of olanzapine treatment. Data source consisted of medical, pharmaceutical, and disability claims from a Fortune 100 manufacturer from 1996 to 1998 (N100,000). The sample included individuals with medical or disability claims for major depressive disorders treated with OFC (nOFC=36). Resource utilization and costs were compared for fluoxetine patients before and after the initiation of olanzapine treatment. Eleven percent of patients on combination therapy received olanzapine and fluoxetine. For patients on fluoxetine, there was a statistically significant reduction in health care utilization, and overall medical costs (20%), following initiation of olanzapine therapy. Overall, it appears the addition of olanzapine to ongoing fluoxetine therapy is effective in reducing outpatient, office, and inpatient utilization, as well as medical costs of patients treated for depression. Further research is needed to investigate combination therapy more fully.

Unlike other aspects of American health experience, there is a current void of accurate statistics on expensive illness experiences. This paper is designed to fill this void. Accurate information will allow the development of an improved framework for discussions of the cost of national health insurance and methods of containing the growth of medical price inflation (insofar as it is affected by large medical expenses) and overall medical expenditure growth. This paper presents a preliminary cross-sectional analysis of the incidence and cost of catastrophic illness in the United States, where catastrophic illness is defined as an illness episode for which a person incurs 55000 or more of medical expenses in a calendar year. The following data are included in the profile: the incidence rate of a catastrophic illness, the average cost of a catastrophic episode, the total number of individuals who incur catastrophic expenses, and the total national cost of all catastrophic episodes. The demographic profile disaggregates these results by specific age, sex, income, and geographic region categories.

This paper estimates a multi-equation model of nursing home behavior using the 1973 NCHS National Nursing Home Survey for data. The paper investigates empirically the effects of public reimbursement and regulatory policies, as well as other exogenous factors, on the following dependent variables: (1) average operating cost; (2) nursing hours per patient-day; (3) an index of rehabilitation-type services; (4) the occupancy rate; (5) the mix of public and private patients; and (6) the rate charged to private patients. The results dramatize the importance of endogeneity concerns in nursing home behavior. Rate setting and many regulations are shown empirically to have unintended and often undesired consequences on cost and other policy criteria of interest. While there has been anecdotal evidence of such system-wide interdependencies, this study affirms that such possibilities must be taken seriously. Rational nursing home regulation cannot proceed apart from a comprehensive understanding of the nursing home behavioral environment.