Challenges Facing Health Service Delivery in Developing Countries and Solution Approaches

This chapter describes a case study of the poor access to healthcare in the developing the countries with more focus on the rural areas and presents an adapted remote care delivery system approach for improving and increasing the access to healthcare services by overcoming certain cultural, social, financial, and linguistic barriers. The remote care delivery system integrates traditional practitioners because most people are more confident with the traditional medicine. The chapter presents the results of a practical on-site test of the proposed system. The test has shown the potentiality of the proposed system to improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare and increase the accessibility of healthcare systems. The chapter also discusses the obstacles for applying standard telemedicine systems and e-health solutions in the developing world.

The MAMICare Project

This chapter is an updated version of a previous work about the authors' project on monitoring pregnancy progress in rural areas and/or areas with poor support of medical services. The project is based on an information technology solution based on mobile devices and health sensors such as electrocardiogram, stethoscope, pulse-oximeter, and blood-glucose meter to automatically collect relevant health data for monitoring pregnancy. In this chapter, the authors provide a detailed description of the software architecture of the system. They include a description of the test they have been performing and the difficulties they have faced for the complete implementation of their system.

Prescriptive Simulation Scenarios for Hospitals Evacuation Management

The emergence of a large number of vulnerabilities and the growing interdependence of economic and social activities put vital networks in a particularly delicate situation. These networks constitute the critical infrastructures of which the security of one of them depends on the others. Being more and more interdependent, their failure can have catastrophic consequences on the whole. The main objective of this chapter aims to study the problem of the occurrence of an electrical failure in the hospitals and to provide anticipatory solutions as decisions to be taken and submitted to the stakeholders involved in the intervention in such critical situations. To this end, an emergency response management system was proposed and modeled by the creation of prescriptive and adaptive simulation scenarios. This system was realized via a web-mobile application. The latter, thanks to the advantages that offers, facilitates the tasks of the stakeholders, improves the quality of the communications, reduces the time required for evacuation, and therefore, limits the scope of the damage.

Recommender Systems in Healthcare

In this chapter the appropriateness of any recommender system in healthcare, which lies in its ability to provide capabilities for meeting the challenges of modern care giving, is examined. The impacts of over two decades of research in and implementation of recommender systems in healthcare are extensively examined in two consecutive periods: first to examine empirical results and practical implementations while the second focuses on validating the earlier findings and justifying the propositions made. Although the result indicates an optimistic progress and upward trend in both the research and implementation, there are compelling reasons to invest more efforts at harmonizing evaluation criteria and metrics. In addition, in order to appropriately, adequately, and effectively meet the challenges of modern care, the rapidly evolving trends, and changing technologies, a novel solution with potential for these capabilities is proposed: a solution to provide real-time recommendations and make them available for sharing among stakeholders in real time.

A Software Modeling Perspective of UMLS Semantic Network

The UMLS is a standard medical vocabulary developed by aggregating standard terminologies and sources from diverse healthcare domains, which encapsulates a broad spectrum of medical knowledge. The two primary knowledge sources of the UMLS are semantic network (SN) and metathesaurus (META). In the present state, the impact of the semantic knowledge captured by UMLS-SN on healthcare application is minimal or has no impact, as UMLS confines the UMLS-SN knowledge. Further, healthcare application design and development is achieved primarily by using sound software modeling principles and established object-oriented (OO) frameworks and languages. The goal of this chapter is to translate UMLS-SN knowledge into an OO modeling framework to utilize SN's knowledge in designing healthcare application. The result is the design and development of UMLS-SN, a custom metamodel by leveraging UML profile and metamodel. This specialized metamodel allows developers to design healthcare applications that are coherent with object-oriented modeling and software engineering approaches.

Deep Learning and Data Balancing Approaches in Mining Hospital Surveillance Data

A number of classifier models on hospital surveillance data to classify admitted patients according to their critical conditions with an emphasis to deep learning paradigms, namely convolutional neural network, were used in this research. Three class labels were used to distinguish the criticality of the admitted 25,261 patients. The authors have set forth two distinct approaches to address the unbalance nature of data. They used multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and multinomial logistic regression classifications and finally compared the performance of our models with the models developed by Firoze, Hasan and Rahman (2013). After comparison, the authors show that one of the models, including convolutional neural network based on deep learning, surpasses most models in terms of classification performance in contingent with training times and epochs. The trade-off is computational power for which—to achieve optimal accuracy—multiple CUDA cores are necessary. The authors achieved stable improvement of classification for their model using CNN.

An Analysis on Supply-Chain-Related Adverse Events

This chapter presents an investigation on supply-chain-related adverse events and patient safety in healthcare. Based on site visits and phone interviews with six healthcare providers, material handling and administrative processes are determined in a typical healthcare supply chain. Then a simulation model is developed to determine correct product validation practices and procedures for maximum patient safety. Benefits of standard product identifying technologies and automated validation systems are also explored to minimize workflow interruptions. Different scenarios are compared for patient safety, care delay, and system efficiency. The results show that validation points during PAR picking or bedside product administration, and warehouse picking operations provide optimal overall system performance. The results also indicate that standard product-identifying technologies and automated validation systems significantly impact the efficiency of supply chain.

Aligning the Perioperative Process to Hospital Strategy

This chapter identifies how dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis, applied to internal and external organizational data, can highlight complex relationships within integrated hospital processes to target opportunity for improvement and ultimately yield improved capabilities aligned to hospital strategy. This case study examines process management practices of balanced scorecards and dashboards to monitor, improve, and align the perioperative process to overall hospital goals at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Based on a 168-month longitudinal study of a 1,157 registered-bed academic medical center, this case study investigates the impact of integrated hospital information systems and business analytics to improve perioperative workflow efficiency, patient care perspective, stakeholder satisfaction, clinical operations, and financial cost effectiveness. The conclusion includes discussion of study implications and limitations.

Determinant Factors of Physicians' Acceptance of E-Health an Empirical Study

This chapter aimed to determine the factors of e-health accepting behavior among the physicians of developing countries. A cross-sectional survey questionnaire method was used for collecting data of this study. To analyze the data the study used structural equation modeling (SEM) with the partial least square (PLS) approach. The findings suggested that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and personal innovativeness had a significant impact on the behavioral intention to use e-health and also the behavioral intention had a significant impact on the actual use behavior of e-health of the physicians. Facilitating conditions had neither a significant impact on behavioral intention nor the actual use behavior of e-health of the physicians. The findings of this study would facilitate the degree of more acceptance of e-health technologies by the physicians for their own betterment and a new chapter of knowledge in the research area.

A Serious Games Framework for Health Rehabilitation

Serious games is a field of research that has evolved substantially with valuable contributions to many application domains and areas. Patients often consider traditional rehabilitation approaches to be repetitive and boring, making it difficult for them to maintain their ongoing interest and to assure the completion of the treatment program. This chapter reviews serious games and the natural and multimodal user interfaces for the health rehabilitation domain. Specifically, it details a framework for the development of serious games that integrates a rich set of features that can be used to improve the designed games with direct benefits to the rehabilitation process. Highlighted features include natural and multimodal interaction, social skills (collaboration and competitiveness), and progress monitoring. Due to the rich set of features supported by the framework, the games' rehabilitation efficacy can be enhanced primarily from an increase in the patient's motivation when exercising the rehabilitation tasks. A preliminary test of the framework with elderly users is described.