Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Visiting nurse association or visiting nurse service
A voluntary health agency which provides nursing services in the home, including health supervision, education and counseling; bedside care; and the carrying out of physicians orders using nurses and other personnel such as home health aides who are specifically trained for specific tasks of personal bedside care. These agencies had their origin in the visiting…
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Visit
An encounter between a patient and a health professional which requires either the patient to travel from his home to the professional’s usual place of practice (an office visit), or vice versa (a housecall or home visit). A short stay with someone, especially to comfort a patient. A short stay with a professional person. In…
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Vendor payment
Used in public assistance programs to distinguish those payments made directly to vendors of service from those cash income payments made directly to assistance recipients. The vendors, or providers of health services, are reimbursed directly by the program for services they provide to eligible recipients. Vendor payments are essentially the same as service benefits provided…
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Vendor
A provider; an institution, agency, organization or individual practitioner who provides health or medical services. Vendor payments are those payments which go directly to such institutions or providers from a third party program like Medicaid. Any person or company that designs, develops, sells, and/or supports goods or services to or for another party.
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Utilization review
Evaluation of the necessity, appropriateness and efficiency of the use of medical services, procedures and facilities. In a hospital this includes review of the appropriateness of admissions, services ordered and provided, length of stay, and discharge practices, both on a concurrent and retrospective basis. Utilization review can be done by a utilization review committee, PSRO,…
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Utilization
Use utilization is commonly examined in terms of patterns or rates of use of a single service or type of service, e.g., hospital care, physician visits, prescription drugs. Measurement of utilization of all medical services in combination is usually done in terms of dollar expenditures. Use is expressed in rates per unit of population at…
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Usual, customary and reasonable plans
Health insurance plans that pay a physician’s full charge if: it does not exceed his usual charge; it does not exceed the amount customarily charged for the service by other physicians in the area (often defined as the 90 or 95 percentile of all charges in the community, or it is otherwise reasonable. In this…
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Uniform individual policy provisions
A set of provisions regarding the nature and content of individual health insurance policies, developed in a recommended model law by the NAIC and adopted (with minor variations) by almost all jurisdictions and permitted in all.
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Uniform hospital discharge data set
A defined set of data which give a minimum description of a hospital episode or admission. Collection of a UHDDS is required upon discharge for all hospital stays reimbursed under Medicare and Medicaid. The UHDDS was defined in a policy statement of the Secretary of HEW (HEW publication number HSM 73-1451, series 4, no. 14,…
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Uniform cost accounting
The use of a common set of accounting definitions, procedures, terms, and methods for the accumulation and communication of quantitative data relating to the financial activities of several enterprises. The American Hospital Association, for example, encourages the use of its Chart of Accounts as a system which can be employed by hospitals in the United…
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