Office laboratory procedures, office economics, parenting and parent education, and urinary tract infection

We again review four areas of interest to office-based pediatricians: office laboratory procedures, office economics, parenting and patient education, and urinary tract infections. Sean Elliott provides an update on the Clinical Laboratories Improvement Amendments (CLIA) and their impact of office practice. Eve Shapiro reviews office economics, focusing on measuring quality of care, use of performance data, costs of new technologies, and the impact of managed care on the medical marketplace. John Walter offers an update on parenting and parent education, with approaches to counseling families about overuse of antibiotics, teen pregnancy, hyperactivity, violence, and asthma. Richard Wahl reviews the recent research on urinary tract infection, with special attention paid to office diagnosis and management, longitudinal studies of children with urinary tract infections, and the controversy surrounding the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Circumcision report.