The Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH) Physician Performance Project seeks to promote system change by measuring individual physician quality, efficiency and patient experience. Reducing variation in physician practice patterns can significantly improve quality of care and moderate costs. As appropriate physician performance information becomes available to consumers, market pressure will become an effective mechanism for improving health care quality and efficiency. Key project goals include:

• Use of comparative performance information for quality improvement among physicians;
• Adoption of benefit designs that incent consumers to make informed health care choices;
• Promotion of financial incentives that reward high quality and efficient physicians in health plan contracting and payment systems;
• Make performance information publicly available for consumer choice.

Advances in Health Care Organization Theory is a much-needed volume for faculty and students in health care administration. It highlights and explains key trends in health care organizations and organizational development, specifically, in the 1990s. This book will be essential for doctoral-level students studying health care organizational theory and research, as well as for those studying organizational sociology, organizational psychology, political science, and management.

The Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment is a landmark reference work and constitutes a definitive resource for academics, practitioners and students working in any field of applied psychological science.

Psychological assessment is a key component of psychological work. Devices of scientific assessment are necessary for adequate describing, diagnosis, predicting, explaining or changing the behavior of all subjects under examination. This double-volume collection offers complete coverage to facilitate action in each of these areas and will consequently be invaluable to psychologists in any applied setting.

The two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment contain a series of 235 entries, organized alphabetically, and covering a variety of fields. Each entry includes a general conceptual and methodological overview, a section on relevant assessment devices, followed by links to related concepts in the Encyclopedia and a list of references.

The Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment offers a truly international perspective, both in terms of the selected authors and chosen entries. It aims to provide an integrated view of assessment, bringing together knowledge dispersed throughout several methodological and applied fields, but united in terms of its relevance for assessment. It is an essential purchase for any library with an existing collection or concern with the field of psychological science in general.

We analyze the relationship between the supply of new technologies and health care utilization and spending, focusing on diagnostic imaging, cardiac, cancer, and newborn care technologies. As anticipated by previous research, increases in the supply of technology tend to be related to higher utilization and spending on the service in question. In some cases, notably diagnostic imaging, increases in availability appear associated with incremental utilization rather than substitution for other services. Policy efforts to assess and manage the availability of new technologies could benefit society where the additional spending produced by new services is not associated with strong quality improvements.

As policymakers consider expanding insurance coverage for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV+) population, it is useful to ask whether insurance has any effect on health outcomes, and, if so, whether public insurance is as efficacious as private insurance in preventing premature death. Using data from a nationally representative cohort of HIV-infected persons receiving regular medical care, we estimate the impact of different types of insurance on mortality in this population. Our main findings are that (1) ignoring observed and unobserved health status misleads one to conclude that insurance may not be protective for HIV patients, (2) after accounting for observed and unobserved heterogeneity, insurance does protect against premature death, and (3) private insurance is more effective than public insurance. The better performance of private insurance can be explained in part by more restrictive Medicaid prescription drug policies that limit access to highly efficacious treatment.

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we examine the relationship between nutritional status, poverty, and food insecurity for household members of various ages. Our most striking result is that, while poverty is predictive of poor nutrition among preschool children, food insecurity does not provide any additional predictive power for this age group. Among school age children, neither poverty nor food insecurity is associated with nutritional outcomes, while among adults and the elderly, both food insecurity and poverty are predictive. These results suggest that researchers should be cautious about assuming connections between food insecurity and nutritional outcomes, particularly among children.