Glossary
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- Iatrogenic
- An illness or injury caused by or resulting from medical or surgical treatment.
- Imperfect information
- See asymmetric information
- Improving Chronic Illness Care Evaluation
- A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded evaluation of the effectiveness of the Chronic Care Model and of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Breakthrough Series Collaborative in improving clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction with care.
- In-service education
- Organized education designed to enhance the skills of staff members or teach them new skills relevant to their responsibilities and disciplines.
- Incidence
- In epidemiology, the frequency of new occurrences of a condition or disease within a defined time interval, as in the number of times a disease occurs during a year.
- Indemnity plan
- Traditional health care insurance that places few restrictions on the character of service covered or choice of provider.
- Independent practice association
- An association of independent physicians or small groups of physicians formed to contract with one or more managed care organizations. Member physicians provide medical services for HMO patients in their own offices and are allowed to maintain private practices.
- Indirect costs
- Costs that are not attributable to a specific program or product, also called overhead costs (e.g., rent, taxes, administrative activities).
- Individual insurance
- Policies that provide protection to the policyholder (individual and/or family); sometimes called personal insurance.
- Individual mandate
- A government policy that requires individuals to have health insurance, either through an employer, an individual plan, a purchasing pool, or by enrolling in a public insurance program (such as Medicaid). One impetus for individual mandates is to increase enrollment of younger, healthier people into insurance pools in order to spread the risk of high expenses across a large number of people.
- Inpatient
- An individual who has been admitted to an acute hospital or other nonambulatory setting and placed under the care of a physician for at least 24 hours.
- Institute of Medicine
- A non-profit, non-governmental organization that acts as an advisor to the federal government on issues of biomedical science, medicine and health. Within the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), it enlists distinguished members of the appropriate professions in the examination of policy matters pertaining to the health of the public.
- Instrumental Activities of Daily Living
- Complex activities required for independent living, such as using a telephone, managing a home or finances, cooking, or using public transportation.
- Intensive Care Unit
- A hospital unit or units providing comprehensive nursing and medical care of critically ill patients, characterized by continuous nursing and medical supervision of high quality and quantity, and by the use of sophisticated monitoring and resuscitative equipment. Units may be organized for the care of specific patient groups (for example, neonatal ICU, neurological ICU, pulmonary ICU).
- Intensivist
- A physician who specializes in intensive care medicine.
- International Classification of Diseases
- A statistical classification system published and revised periodically by the World Health Organization (WHO). It consists of a listing of diagnoses and identifying codes that have been used for reporting primary and secondary diagnoses for consistent claims documentation. Since 1998, the ICD-9 has been mandatory for Medicare claims.
- International Medical Graduate
- Replaces the term "foreign medical graduate"and describes a physician who has graduated from a medical school outside of the United States.
- Interoperability
- The ability to communicate and exchange data accurately, effectively, securely, and consistently with different information technology systems, software applications, and networks in various settings, and exchange data such that clinical or operational purpose and meaning of the data are preserved and unaltered.