PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

M Drain

Publications and source records attributed to M Drain.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Examining closure rates of rural hospitals: an assessment of a strategic taxonomy.

This article reports a study of rural hospital failure. Testing a model previously suggested by Drain and Godkin (1996), analysis incorporated four financial ratios used to graphically depict the external environment of a hospital or portfolio of hospitals relative to that of an average facility. Applied to a random sample of rural hospitals, the evidence supports the model's ability to exhibit clustering differences on five of seven selected structure-related variables, and trend activity for the group of hospitals that failed during the period under study.

Catchment Area, Health↗
PubMed2001

Quality improvement in primary care and the importance of patient perceptions.

Increasing consumerism poses many challenges for health care providers, particularly for those in primary care. Quality improvement to meet patients' heightened demand for service excellence will require effective, continuous measurement of patient perceptions. The study described in this article evaluated the psychometric properties of a new instrument designed to survey patients' experiences with the delivery of primary care and assessed the factors that contribute to patient retention and likelihood to return. By systematically measuring patient satisfaction and perceptions of quality, medical practices can increase the effectiveness of primary care, improve patient outcomes, and control costs.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1998

What is "special" about face perception?

There is growing evidence that face recognition is "special" but less certainty concerning the way in which it is special. The authors review and compare previous proposals and their own more recent hypothesis, that faces are recognized "holistically" (i.e., using relatively less part decomposition than other types of objects). This hypothesis, which can account for a variety of data from experiments on face memory, was tested with 4 new experiments on face perception. A selective attention paradigm and a masking paradigm were used to compare the perception of faces with the perception of inverted faces, words, and houses. Evidence was found of relatively less part-based shape representation for faces. The literatures on machine vision and single unit recording in monkey temporal cortex are also reviewed for converging evidence on face representation. The neuropsychological literature is reviewed for-evidence on the question of whether face representation differs in degree or kind from the representation of other types of objects.

Face↗
PubMed1997

Object-centered neglect for letters: do informational asymmetries play a role?

In a study of right-parietal patients, Behrmann and Moscovitch [Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 6, pp.1-16, 1994] found object-centered left neglect for asymmetrical but not symmetrical letters, leading them to attribute this neglect to the objects' canonical handedness or intrinsic asymmetry. Using a similar task, we find the same results in neurologically intact observers. However, right-sided bias was observed only when the letters were identified. Because asymmetrical letters are distinguished by features on their right sides, we propose that the apparent object-centered bias in normals and in right-parietal patients may arise from attending to identifying features rather than from representational differences between symmetrical and asymmetrical letters.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Vertical orienting control: evidence for attentional bias and "neglect" in the intact brain.

Unilateral neglect may be due to attentional bias: an exaggerated tendency to orient in an ipsilesional direction. Likewise, cases of vertical neglect suggest the existence of vertical attentional biases. This article reports evidence of upward biases in neurologically intact observers. In 5 experiments, observers performed a visual line-bisection task by judging the location of a gap along a tachistoscopically presented vertical line. The upward bias was influenced by attentional cues and was stronger in the right visual field than in the left visual field. Instructions designed to foster the use of an object-based, categorical encoding strategy were associated with an upward bias, whereas those fostering spatial, between-object comparisons were not. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric differences in attention and specializations along the dorsal-ventral axis of the brain that influence directional orienting.

Attention↗
PubMed1996

A portfolio approach to strategic hospital analysis: exposition and explanation.

Hospital planners rely on a number of graphic and quantitative devices to facilitate hospital strategic planning and each has its place. It is the comprehensive, user-friendly, environmental assessment models that are missing, however. This article seeks to remedy this condition through the introduction of a portfolio approach to strategic analysis. The authors review the analytical tools currently used by hospital planners to place this model in context and provide an exposition of the model and an explanation of how it is constructed and interpreted.

Catchment Area, Health↗