Eight Year Data from an Integrated Health Care Setting   Sponsor     National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)   Principal Investigator     Patricia Culliton, M.A., L.Ac. Hennepin Faculty Associates Alternative Medicine Clinic   Description     Using data generated by patient-visits to an alternative medicine clinic that has been located on the campus of a mainstream healthcare facility since 1993, this health services research project contributes information valuable to healthcare and insurance executives who are interested in establishing systemic-level integration of CAM and conventional medicine.   Role of the Berman Center     Staff from Berman Center work closely with HFA financial analysts to obtain original patient encounter data to the Alternative Medicine Clinic. Berman Center staff transform these encounter data into a form useful for research purposes, generate hypotheses, and analyze the data in order to test the hypotheses and produce necessary tables and graphs.   Abstract     Hennepin Faculty Associates (HFA) is a network of over 250 conventional care physicians, staffing the Hennepin County Medical Center, a public multi-disciplinary health care campus in downtown Minneapolis. In 1993, after 10 years of research and limited service, HFA opened an Alternative Medicine Division and Clinic which, in 2000, served approximately 1200 individuals in more than 9000 patient-visits. Approximately 80% of the services provided at the Clinic are paid by 3rd party payers; over 75% of HFA physicians have referred patients to the clinic at least once.     The primary aim of the study is to analyze data from 1997-2002 to address questions relevant to establishing integrated health care delivery systems. Data are analyzed to identify factors associated with number of CAM visits and patterns of use, as well as factors associated with prevalence of use among all patients visiting the entire system. They also are analyzed to compare health care uses and costs, from 1998 through 2002, for patients presenting with similar pain complaints in 1997, some of whom received acupuncture to treat their pain, and some of whom did not.     This project responds to RFA AT-01-001: Integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: A Health Services Research Perspective, which sought research projects that would facilitate integration of proven CAM therapies into the total health care delivery system in the U.S.