Journal of General Internal Medicine

See the following -

Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have

Jonathon Cohn | The Huffington Post | March 31, 2016

One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...

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Popular Mobile Health Apps Fail to Serve Vulnerable Populations

Press Release | University of California San Francisco | July 14, 2016

A new UC San Francisco study of top-rated mobile health apps showed that they offer little help to vulnerable patients – those who might benefit the most from these tools. The new study, published in the July 14, 2016 online issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, was conducted with 26 patients at The Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG), a UCSF partner hospital that treats many low-income patients. Although participant income was not directly queried, a majority of patients at ZSFG qualify for publically funded insurance, or do not have insurance.

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RAND Corporation study: VA Health System Generally Delivers Higher-Quality Care Than Other Health Providers

Press Release | Rand Corporation | April 26, 2018

The VA health care system performs similar to or better than non-VA systems on most measures of inpatient and outpatient care quality, although there is high variation in quality across individual VA facilities, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Examining a wide array of commonly used measures of health care quality, researchers found that VA hospitals generally provided better quality care than non-VA hospitals and the VA's outpatient services were better quality when compared to commercial HMOs, Medicaid HMOs and Medicare HMOs...“Consistent with previous studies, our analysis found that the VA health care system generally provides care that is higher in quality than what is offered elsewhere in communities across the nation,” said Rebecca Anhang Price, lead author of the study and senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

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Research Raises Questions About App Usability, Accessibility

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 5, 2016

While mobile health apps have the potential to help patients better manage their chronic conditions, consumers that would benefit most—the poor and minorities—are not able to access and use the technology to realize the benefits. That’s the finding of a new observational study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine researching the impact of apps developed to enable adults to manage their chronic conditions...

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