Healthcare and the Effect of Technology - Advances in Healthcare Information Systems and Administration
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9781615207336, 9781615207343

Author(s):  
Emmett Davis

Information and knowledge technologies, both alone and embedded in other advancing technologies, will transform health care. These technologies become part of health care because they bring efficiencies until they reach a tipping point where health care cannot function without them. These technologies add to the complexity of health care further creating a complex adaptive system. They function as strange attractors, or focal points, for intense, persistent, and accelerating change, which transforms the culture and control mechanisms of health care. Such smart technologies as artificial intelligence combined with genomic and nanotechnologies may bring about such a radical change that we could not return to today’s health care system. For the transformation to be optimal, health care needs to address such issues as quality improvement processes, more intelligent electronic security, new control mechanisms, redefinition of the boundaries of health care enterprises, and a change from operating in discrete to continuous information flows.


Author(s):  
Dario Bottazzi ◽  
Rebecca Montanari ◽  
Tarik Taleb

The demographic compression, along with heightened life expectancy and decreases in fertility rates, is dramatically raising the number of older adults in society, thus putting many countries’ healthcare systems under significant pressure. Eventual loss of physical and cognitive skills makes it quite difficult for elders to maintain autonomous life-styles and often forces them to move to assisted living environments, with severe emotional and social impacts. The main challenge for the years to come is, therefore, to identify more sustainable approaches to eldercare, capable of improving elders’ independence in order to avoid, or at least to delay, hospitalization. Providing suitable support for elders is, indeed, a highly challenging problem. However, recent advancements in pervasive computing enable the development of advanced eldercare services. The main focus of eldercare research to date has been directed towards the development of smart environments capable of assisting elders, for example, in monitoring their psychophysical conditions, and of reminding and facilitating their routine activities. Few research efforts have been directed towards the investigation of solutions capable of improving social engagement for elders living alone, and of facilitating the coordination of care-giving efforts. The chapter provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology in eldercare research and suggests the extension of available solutions by adopting integrated approaches that aim at addressing both assistance and social/coordination issues stemming from eldercare.


Author(s):  
Malina Jordanova

Brought to life by contemporary changes of our world, e-health offers enormous possibilities. In the World Health Organization’s World Health Assembly resolution on e-health, WHO has defined e-health as the cost-effective and secure use of information and communication technologies in support of health and health-related fields, including healthcare services, health surveillance, health literature, and health education (WHO, 2005). It is impossible to have a detailed view of its potential as e-health affects the entire health sector and is a viable tool to provide routine, as well as specialized, health services. It is able to improve both the access to, and the standard of, health care. The aim of the chapter is to focus on how e-health can help in closing one gap - optimizing patient care. The examples included and references provided are ready to be introduced in practice immediately. Special attention is dedicated to cost effectiveness of e-health applications.


Author(s):  
Francesco Paolucci ◽  
Henry Ergas ◽  
Terry Hannan ◽  
Jos Aarts

Health care is complex and there are few sectors that can compare to it in complexity and in the need for almost instantaneous information management and access to knowledge resources during clinical decision-making. There is substantial evidence available of the actual, and potential, benefits of e-health tools that use computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSS) as a means for improving health care delivery. CDSS and associated technologies will not only lead to an improvement in health care but will also change the nature of what we call electronic health records (EHR) The technologies that “define” the EHR will change the nature of how we deliver care in the future. Significant challenges relating to the evaluation of these health information management systems relate to demonstrating their ongoing cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, and effects on the quality of care and patient outcomes. However, health information technology is still mainly about the effectiveness of processes and process outcomes, and the technology is still not mature, which may lead to unintended consequences, but it remains promising and unavoidable in the long run.


Author(s):  
Jinan Fiaidhi ◽  
Sabah Mohammed ◽  
Yuan Wei

Now that the health and medical sector is slowly but surely beginning to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and tactics such as social networking, blogging, and sharing health information, such usage may become an everyday occurrence. This new trend is emerging under the Health 2.0 umbrella where it has important effects on the future of medicine. This chapter introduces some important Health 2.0 concepts and discusses their advantages for health care and medical practice. In addition, this chapter provides a case study for building a Semantic Blog for Gene Annotation and Searching (GAS) among social network users. The GAS Blog enables users to syndicate and aggregate gene case studies via the RSS protocol, annotate gene case studies with the ability to add new tags (folksonomy), and search for/navigate gene case studies among a group or cross-groups based on FOAF, GO, and SCORM metadata. The GAS Blog is built upon an open source toolkit (WordPress) and further programmed via PHP. The GAS Blog is found to be very effective for annotation and navigation when compared with the traditional gene annotation and navigation systems, as well as with traditional search engines such as XPath.


Author(s):  
Candace J. Gibson ◽  
Kelly J. Abrams

The introduction of information technologies and the electronic record in health care is thought to be a key means of improving efficiencies and effectiveness of the health care system; ensuring critical information is readily available at the point of care, decreasing unnecessary duplication of tests, increasing patient safety (particularly from adverse drug events), and linking providers and patients spatially and temporally across the continuum of care as health care moves out of the traditional hospital setting to the community and home. There is a steady movement in many countries towards eHealth and a fully implemented, in some cases, pan-regional or pan-national electronic heath record. A number of barriers and challenges exist in EHR implementation. These include lack of resources (both capital and human resources), resistance to change and adoption of new technologies, and lack of standards to ensure interoperability across separate applications and systems. From the public’s perspective, maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of personal health information is a prominent concern and privacy of personal health information still looms as a potential stumbling block for the implementation of a omprehensive, shared electronic record. There are some steps that can be taken to increase the public’s comfort level and to ensure that these new systems are designed and used with security and privacy in mind.


Author(s):  
Kalyan Sunder Pasupathy

Healthcare organizations are struggling to provide safe and high quality care while reducing costs. Abundant data on various aspects of the care delivery process (both clinical and non-clinical) are collected and stored in large databases in different parts of the organization. Informatics, as an area of study with roots in computer science and information science, has grown and evolved to enable collection, storage, retrieval, and analysis of data, and reporting of useful information. Health informatics (HI) ranges from bioinformatics to public health informatics depending on the level of focus and applications. At the same time, systems engineering (SE), as an interdisciplinary field of engineering, has grown to encompass the design, analysis, and management of complex health systems to improve their quality and performance. HI and SE are complementary in their approach to identification of problems, methodology, and solution procedure for improvement. This combination brings forth implications for industry and education to address pressing issues of today’s health care delivery.


Author(s):  
Kendall Ho

While information technologies, the Internet, and mobile technologies are introducing innovative approaches to knowledge exchange, communication, and new knowledge generation, the health system is comparatively slow in taking up these approaches towards healthcare service delivery. This chapter discusses the opportunities that information technology (IT) can offer to health care system innovation and improvement, highlights some key IT trends that will guide research and development, and highlights some current examples. Some action steps are suggested to accelerate the adoption of IT into routine health practices.


Author(s):  
Gulzar H. Shah ◽  
Kaveepan Lertwachara ◽  
Anteneh Ayanso

In this chapter, the authors provide a review of recent developments in probabilistic record linkage and their implications in healthcare research and public health policies. Their primary objective is to pique the interest of researchers and practitioners in the healthcare and public health communities to take full advantage of record linkage technologies in completing a health care scenario where different pieces of patient records are collected and managed by different agencies. A brief overview of probabilistic record linkage, software available for such record linkage, and type of functions provided by probabilistic record linkage software is provided. Specific cases where probabilistic linkage has been used to bridge information gaps in informing public health policy and enhancing decision-making in healthcare delivery are described in this chapter. Issues and challenges of integrating medical records across distributed databases are also outlined, including technical considerations as well as concerns about patient privacy and confidentiality.


Author(s):  
Anthony C Smith ◽  
Sisira Edirippulige

Providing quality healthcare services to geographically isolated communities remains a considerable challenge to health service providers throughout the world. The conventional approach of referring patients to specialists often requiring the patient to travel long distances still remains mainstream. Meanwhile, the advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) have acted as a catalyst for substantial changes in human activities in areas such as communication, commerce, and education. Researchers are exploring the potential of ICT to improve health services for patients in rural and remote areas. This chapter provides an overview of telemedicine applications and the experience of a research and health service which has pioneered the delivery of specialist pediatric services at a distance (telepediatrics) in Queensland, Australia.


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