Dr Foster's Hospital Guide, published today, is a welcome source of information about standards in healthcare services, which patients and purchasers of healthcare services can use.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are designed to bring together all of the relevant primary sources of research evidence in a particular topic area, and disseminate this in a format that informs clinicians, patients, healthcare purchasers and guideline developers.
I worry that benefits managers often fall short of their fiduciary duties and put themselves at risk by simply assuming that vendors are acting in patients' and purchasers' interests.
Stakeholders can be the patients or purchasers of goods and services [ 18].
In contrast to small mean differences originally reported, NNTs were small and could be attractive to clinicians, patients, and purchasers.
Even for manipulation at one year, which had the smallest of the statistically significant mean effects, the NNT could be attractive to clinicians, patients, and purchasers.
[ 7] In contrast to the small mean differences originally reported, NNTs were small and could be attractive to clinicians, patients and purchasers.
11 The data can be used by patients and purchasers to select an NHS Trust for their surgical procedure, and by Trusts to stimulate quality improvements.
Whilst not wanting to make too much of a post-hoc re-analysis of these data, it is clear that the small NNTs we derived might, if confirmed, make manipulation very attractive to clinicians, patients, and purchasers.
Although there are many studies for temporal data mining, they do not deal with discovering knowledge from temporal interval data such as patient histories, purchaser histories, and web logs etc.
