Recent years have seen the beginning of an industrial revolution in healthcare delivery. Healthcare is being transformed from a cottage industry, in which each provider sets individual standards, to a quality-controlled enterprise with common, evidence-based standards of care. Disease management...

Objective: To assess the impact of a comprehensive migraine disease management program, as measured by humanistic outcomes measures, conducted in a managed care setting. Design: A prospective comparative study comprised of an intervention and a control group to evaluate the impact of the disease...

Background: The usefulness of questionnaires to assess asthma control in clinical practice is recognized in recent international guidelines. While several questionnaires have been developed to measure asthma control in adults, there has been little study of the performance of such instruments in...

Most studies on the indirect costs of an illness and the cost effectiveness of a medical intervention or employer-sponsored wellness program assume that the value of reducing the number of days employees miss from work due to illness is the wage rate. This paper presents a general model to...

Using data from a survey of 800 managers in 12 industries, we find empirical support for the hypothesis that the cost associated with missed work varies across jobs according to the ease with which a manager can find a perfect replacement for the absent worker, the extent to which the worker...

Many employers in the US are investing in new programmes to improve the quality of medical care and simultaneously shifting more of the healthcare costs to their employees without understanding the implications on the amount and type of care their employees will receive. These seemingly...

This paper reports on a study of manager perceptions of the cost to employers of on-the-job employee illness, sometimes termed 'presenteeism,' for various types of jobs. Using methods developed previously, the authors analyzed data from a survey of more than 800 US managers to determine the...

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) represents the next stage in an evolution of research and knowledge development in regard to medical interventions. In this article we describe the challenges currently facing the innovative pharmaceuticals industry and briefly summarize the history of...

Using data from a survey of 800 managers in 12 industries, we find empirical support for the hypothesis that the cost associated with missed work varies across jobs according to the ease with which a manager can find a perfect replacement for the absent worker, the extent to which the worker...