Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Modern technology development created significant innovations in delivery of healthcare. Artificial intelligence as “a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behaviour in computers” when applied in health care resulted in intelligent support to decision-making, optimised business processes, increased quality, monitoring and delivering of personalised treatment plans and many other applications. Even though the benefits are clear and numerous, there are still open issues in creating automation of healthcare processes, ensuring data protection and integrity, reduction of medical waste etc. However, due to rapid development of AI techniques, more advances and improvements are still expected.

Health Organization Development and Design

This chapter aims at providing the student with a general overview of the Health Organization Development and Design basic concepts. More precisely, this chapter outlines the origins and the future of Health services planning and development and the structure of health organizations. The typology of different international healthcare systems implemented in United Kingdom, United States of America, Greece, Serbia and Germany is also presented.

Mission and Structure of Health Services

This chapter aims at providing the student with a general overview of the appropriate structure and ethics healthcare organizations are based on, the concept of ethical leadership, the importance of having clear statements of mission, vision and value in healthcare organizations and the Health Promotion Charters implemented in a Globalized World.

Health and Health Determinants

This chapter aims at providing the student with a general overview of the Health and Health Determinantsbasic concepts. More precisely, this chapter provides a definition and explanation of health and health determinants and presents an overview of measures in epidemiology.

Communication and Public Relations in Healthcare

This chapter is written in order to provide the student with a general overview of communication and public relations in healthcare. All healthcare institutions have a need for adequate and successful communication with their external and internal stakeholders. Every contact of a particular healthcare organization with the public represents a unique interface, as an important part of the communication strategy. Therefore, it is very important to create strategic consistency among all the messages that stakeholders need to receive. The chapter will discuss the relationships between the various components of integrated marketing communications in healthcare, crisis management in the communications sphere and ethics and social responsibility issues.

Management Accounting

Healthcare institutions are business systems that provide different medical products and services to improve the health and quality of life of users of products and services. First of all, this is reflected in the differing complexities of the business, but also of the products and services they offer, as well as the different costs they cause. Thus, some products or services cause high indirect costs, while others require higher direct costs. For health care managers to make the right business decisions, they must continually have timely, quality and truthful information at their disposal. This information is provided by the management accounting of the institutions. This paper aims to present management accounting activities that enable the acquisition of information necessary for decision making.

Introduction to Health Law

In early February of 2020, attention was drawn to the increased number of deaths and the new cases of coronavirus infection. The epicentre of the outbreak was Wuhan in the People’s Republic of China. In order to control the outbreak, Chinese leaders called on the city authorities in Wuhan to set up mass quarantine centres for infected people. The Chinese government took this step to protect the public against infectious disease. This is an example of the conflicts between public health and civil liberties/individual rights. Government authority is the pillar of the public health law. The government retains the power to achieve and maintain common good by restricting – within solid international and national limits – individual rights concerning autonomy, privacy, association, and liberty. Public health agencies have the right to collect, use, and disclose a considerable amount of personal health information and to enforce certain vaccinations, medical examinations, and treatments. In addition to the power to isolate individuals to protect the public against the spread of infectious disease, their powers can be used to control businesses and professions. There are several legal interventions to prevent injury and disease and promote the public’s health. Among these tools are taxing policies, which encourage engaging in beneficial behaviour (fruit consumption) and disincentives to engage in high-risk activities (smoking).

Healthcare Data Analytics

Health analytics is a branch of analysis that focuses on the analysis of complex and large amounts of health data that are characterized by high dimensionality, irregularities and rarities. Their aim is to improve and increase the efficiency of the process of healthcare providers, working with patients, managing costs and resources, improve diagnostic procedures and treatments, etc. The prime focus is investigating historical data and finding templates for different scenarios. As a final product, usually different visualisation tools are produced to support practitioners in patient care to provide better services, and to improve existing procedures.

IT-Assisted Process Management in Healthcare

Clinical processes need to be well understood before a new health IT tool can be introduced. Observations, interviews, surveys, or documentation analysis are carried out to systematically collect information to better understand a clinical process. To aggregate and visualize the collected information about a clinical process, use case diagrams can build a basis. Formal process models such as process chain diagrams or BPMN diagrams are well suited to model the process in detail. The objective of this chapter is to discuss these methods for analyzing and modeling clinical processes, as this is an important precondition for systematic process management in health care.

eHealth and Clinical Documentation Systems

eHealth is the use of modern information and communication technology (ICT) for trans-institutional healthcare purposes. Important subtopics of eHealth are health data sharing and telemedicine. Most of the clinical documentation to be shared is collected in patient records to support patient care. More sophisticated approaches to electronic patient records are trans-institutional or (inter-)national. Other aims for clinical documentation are quality management, reimbursement, legal issues, and medical research. Basic prerequisite for eHealth is interoperability, which can be divided into technical, semantic and process interoperability. There is a variety of international standards to support interoperability. Telemedicine is a subtopic of eHealth, which bridges spatial distance by using ICT for medical (inter-)actions. We distinguish telemedicine among healthcare professionals and telemedicine between health care professionals and patients. Both have a great potential to face the challenges of aging societies, the increasing number of chronically ill patients, multimorbidity and low number of physicians in remote areas. With ongoing digitalization more and more data are available digitally. Clinical documentation is an important source for big data analysis and artificial intelligence. The patient has an important role: Telemonitoring, wearable technologies, and smart home devices provide digital health data from daily life. These are high-quality data which can be used for medical decisions.