Spanish Diabetes Health Care UtilizationClick here for English version (opens in new window)
ScoringThese are single items. We have found that we often have to follow up with telephone clarification for these items, no matter how they are written. We always do telephone clarification for people that have more than 1 MD visit per month and for all hospitalizations and ER visits. You will need to figure out how stringent you want to be in your own research. For example, do you want to count an ER visit that resulted in an in-patient admission? Do you want to distinguish between acute and SNF nights in hospital (patients often can't distinguish)? Do you want to clarify whether the physician visits include infusions, allergy shots, dialysis, or diagnostic tests? CharacteristicsTested on 189 Spanish-speaking subjects with diabetes.
Source of Psychometric DataStanford Spanish Diabetes Self-Management (Tomando Control de su Diabetes) Study, ongoing. Unpublished. CommentsThere is no gold standard - self-report is not perfect. Especially when one has many visits, there tends to be an under-reporting of visits. At the same time there are significant problems with both chart audits and electronic medical records. The article below discusses these and makes a strong case of the use of self-report, at least for community-based studies. ReferencesRitter PL, Kaymaz H, Stewart A, Sobel DS, Lorig KR, Self-reports of health care utilization compared to provider records. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2001, 54, pp.136-141. To download this scale and scoring instructions, right click the link below with your mouse and "Save as" to you hard disk or desktop (for Windows), or double click (Mac):
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