Introduction:The experience of chronic patients with the care they receive, fuelled by the focus on patient-centeredness and the increasing evidence on its positive relation with other dimensions of quality, is being acknowledged as a key element in improving the quality of care. There are a dearth of accepted tools and metrics to assess patient experience from the patient’s perspective that have been adapted to the new chronic care context: continued, systemic, with multidisciplinary teams and new technologies.Methods:Development and validation of a scale conducting a literature review, expert panel, pilot and field studies with 356 chronic primary care patients, to assess content and face validities and reliability.Results:IEXPAC is an 11+1 item scale with adequate metric properties measured by Alpha Chronbach, Goodness of fit index, and satisfactory convergence validity around three factors named: productive interactions, new relational model and person’s self-management.Conclusions:IEXPAC allows measurement of the patient experience of chronic illness care. Together with other indicators, IEXPAC can determine the quality of care provided according to the Triple Aim framework, facilitating health systems reorientation towards integrated patient-centred care.

The IEMAC contains a set of interventions that can be used as a road map by decision makers, managers and clinicians interested in building a state-of-the-art chronic care model. At the same time, the IEMAC allows healthcare organizations to identify their baseline score and the progress achieved after improvement interventions.

Background. The study is aimed at assessing the costs before and after the diagnosis and the provision of effective treatment for panic disorder (PD), and the offset effect related to the psychiatric encounter.Method. A 24-month prepost design was used to collect data on clinical status and health care services utilisation in a natural environment. The 61 PD patients' assessment included the SCID-UP, ratings on general functioning, improvement, severity of symptoms and level of disability. All health care services used and lost workdays were recorded.Results. Both sociodemographic characteristics and the outcome show that this was a standard group of PD patients, who received effective treatment for their condition. The total direct costs of health care use during the previous year and the year after the diagnosis were, respectively, US$ 29 1 58 and US$ 46 256. The indirect costs of lost productivity were US$ 65 643 in period I and US$ 13 883 in period II.Conclusions. A strong offset effect (94%) has been found in this study, significantly greater than the one described for psychiatric disorders as a whole. The costs of nondiagnosis are usually overlooked when estimating the global costs of PD. Methods for improving early detection of PD may substantially reduce the costs incurred before diagnosis.

Objective: Design and validate a measure of the experience of family caregivers with the integrated care that receive the persons they care for. Methods: The new instrument for measuring the experience of caregivers is based on the Instrument to Evaluate the EXperience of PAtients with Chronic Diseases (acronym in Spanish: IEXPAC) scale instrument. With the qualitative technique of the discussion group, nine professionals and eight caregivers assessed the face validity of the instrument and they advised on issues to explore and the measuring scale to use. The instrument’s items were analyzed individually, as well as its consistency, reliability, and construct and empirical validity. Results: 235 caregivers responded, of which 186 (79%) were women. The average age of the persons under their care was 83.9 years (SD 9.7). The scale’s score when eliminating its items one by one ranged between 38.6 and 41.1. The factorial saturations of the items ranged between 0.53 and 0.82. Cronbach’s alpha (12 elements) was 0.88 and the Kuder-Richardson coefficient was 0.91. The factorial solution explained 64.3% of the total variance and allowed isolating two factors (with 11 items with saturations greater than 0.65): care for the patient, and care for the caregiver. The internal consistency of both factors was greater than 0.80. The scale’s score was 41.1 (SD 9.7). Conclusions: The Caregivers Experience Instrument combines acceptability, ease of comprehension, and perceived usefulness for the caregivers. It has adequate internal consistency, reliability, and construct and empirical validity.

Introduction: The Instrumento de Evaluación de Modelos de Atención ante la Cronicidad/Assessment of Readiness for Chronicity in Health Care Organisations instrument was developed to implement the conceptual framework of the Chronic Care Model in the Spanish national health system. It has been used to assess readiness to tackle chronicity in health care organisations. In this study, we use selfassessments at macro-, meso-and micro-management levels to (a) describe the two-year experience with the Instrumento de Evaluación de Modelos de Atención ante la Cronicidad/Assessment of Readiness for Chronicity in Health Care Organisations tool in Spain and (b) assess the validity and reliability of this instrument.