Continuity-of-Care Measures

Medical CarePublished 1 January 1990

Erik Anders Eriksson

DOI10.1097/00005650-199002000-00009

Source URL

Citations16

SJR quartileQ1

SJR score1.57

SNIP1.38

TL;DR

For a long period of time, continuity of care has been recognized as a major aspect of the quality of primary health care and a set of potential determinants (medical, socioeconomic, and, notably, policy variables) and a potential positive or negative effect is recognized.

Abstract

For a long period of time, continuity of care has been recognized as a major aspect of the quality of primary health care. Some scholars operate with comprehensive notions of continuity encompassing a variety of dimensions of primary care (see, for example, Wall1 and further references in that paper). Another line of research, represented by Steinwachs,2 Eriksson and Mattsson,3 and others, focuses on design and assessment of quantitative measures of various dimensions of continuity. The latter approach views continuity as an intermediate variable, lying between a set of potential determinants (medical, socioeconomic, and, notably, policy variables) and a potential positive or negative effect (e.g., better patient compliance with prescriptions, or delayed referral in certain cases). Typically, stressing determinants of continuity would be appropriate for evaluations (such as that by Mattsson and Westman4) of administrative reform. Such evaluative use of measures of continuity could be based on adopting continuity as a policy goal per se. This is not unreasonable in situations like the Swedish context, in which attitude surveys report a keen public interest in continuity of care.5 Alternatively, it could be based on empiric studies linking high conti

Keywords

Health ProfessionsEconomics, Econometrics and FinanceBusiness, Management and Accounting

Medical CareA Quantitative Measure of Continuity of Care

533 Citations1977Thomas W. Bice, Stuart B. Boxerman

Two statistical measures for quantifying the concept of continuity of medical care constitute a significant advancement in the quantification of this notion, representing an improvement over the simpler measures of continuity employed previously.

Academic MedicineContinuity of care in a university-based practice

240 Citations1975Naomi Breslau, K G Reeb

Although continuity of well-child visits remained unchanged at the university setting, the continuity of sick visits declined markedly; an increased use of doctor visits for illness care was observed; its relationship with the decline in continuity is analyzed and discussed.

Medical CareMeasuring Provider Continuity in Ambulatory Care

149 Citations1979Donald M. Steinwachs

New measures are proposed that complement and improve upon certain limitations of existing measures and are applied to a pilot study of hypertensive patients being seen in a medical outpatient clinic of a teaching hospital.

PubMedContinuity of care and family medicine: definition, determinants, and relationship to outcome.

68 Citations1981Wall Em

Future research in the area of continuity of care must provide reliable measures of the different continuity dimensions followed by well-controlled trials assessing the impact of these dimensions on the satisfaction, comfort, and health status of patients.

Medical CareContinuity-of-Care Measures An Analytic and Empirical Comparison

58 Citations1984G ran Ejlertsson, Sven Berg

The authors compared four different continuity-of-care measures recently suggested in the literature, and the basic finding is the substantially higher index values for elderly patients.

Medical CareQuantitative Measurement of Continuity of Care

58 Citations1983Erik Anders Eriksson, Lars‐Göran Mattsson

It is argued that the same weighting scheme is appropriate in many situations when equal weighting of individuals has been used and it is possible to derive every individual-based measure hitherto proposed from visit-based measures.

Medical CareMeasures of Continuity of Care

56 Citations1986rjan Smedby, Gunnar Eklund +2 more

In an empirical study using data from a health center in Sweden, correlation coefficients were computed among nine different measures of continuity of care, five of them visit-based and four individual- based, and the results suggest that the measure COC should be preferred among the individual-based measures and fraction-of-care continuity among the visitbased measures.

Medical CareContinuity of Care: Does It Contribute to Quality of Care?

51 Citations1980Leslíe L. Roos, Noralou P. Roos +2 more

Patients receiving tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy in Manitoba for one year and a group of similar individuals treated for respiratory illnesses but not having T and As, were studied, finding no causal relationship between continuity and quality.

Medical CareContinuity of Care

13 Citations1984Bj rn Smedby, rjan Smedby +3 more

This companion article applies visit-based measures to the actual experience of a primary health care center in Sweden, illustrating their flexibility by presenting empirical studies that could not have been carried out with the traditional approach.

Family PracticeEvaluation of Provider Continuity in Primary Care: Actual Versus Random and Potential Continuity

9 Citations1987Lars‐Göran Mattsson, Göran Westman

The results show that the actual physician continuity, although not particularly high, was considerably higher than what could be expected according to chance alone (random continuity), and actual continuity did appear to increase after the organizational changes were implemented--absolutely as well as in relation to potential continuity.