Changes in AIDS case reporting after hospital site visits.

In an effort to improve AIDS case reporting, site visits (meetings with hospital staff to encourage reporting) were made to all Philadelphia hospitals. Comparisons of hospitals visited during a 7-week period with hospitals not visited during that period indicated that the site visits were followed by a marked increase in case reports. No similar increase was observed at the comparison hospitals. The increased reporting was accompanied by an increased lag time from diagnosis to report, suggesting that the additional reports at visited hospitals were the result of the identification of previously missed cases rather than a speedup of reporting. Cases reported after the visits were more likely to have white-collar occupations or private medical insurance than were those reported before the visits.