Background: By performing case management, general practitioners and health care assistants can provide additional benefits to their chronically ill patients. However, the economic effects of such case management interventions often remain unclear although how to manage the burden of chronic...

Background: Risk attitudes influence decisions made under uncertainty. This paper investigates the association of risk attitudes with the utilization of preventive and general healthcare services, work absence and resulting costs to explore their contribution to the heterogeneity in utilization....

The Risk Adjustment Reform Act of 2001 mandates that a health-status-based risk adjustment mechanism has to be implemented in Germany's Statutory Health Insurance system by January 1, 2007. German parliament decided this as with the existing demographic risk adjustment model, that means there is...

Surgical measures to combat obesity are very effective in terms of weight loss, recovery from diabetes, and improvement in cardiovascular risk factors. However, previous studies found both positive and negative results regarding the effect of bariatric surgery on health care utilization. Using...

Objective To evaluate healthcare and outcomes of disease management programmes (DMPs) for patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) in primary care, and to assess selection of enrolment for these programmes.Methods A cross-sectional survey of 2330 statutorily insured patients with a history of...

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three...

Multi-state transition models are widely applied tools to analyze individual event histories in the medical or social sciences. In this paper we propose the use of (discrete-time) competing-risks duration models to analyze multi-transition data. Unlike conventional Markov transition models,...

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. It has serious health effects and causes substantial costs for society. <Emphasis Type="Bold">Objectives: The aim of the present paper was to develop a state-of-the-art decision-analytic model of COPD...</emphasis></emphasis>

Background: Various software packages are commonly used for the implementation and calculation of decision-analytic models for health economic evaluations. However, comparison of these programs with regard to ease of implementing a model is lacking. Objectives: (i) to compare the assets and...