Building Resilient Healthcare Systems With Icts

One of the challenges encountered in the provision of healthcare is the inability of healthcare systems to adapt to or respond adequately to adverse events (pandemics or otherwise), especially in settings with limited resources. ICTs can be built into healthcare systems to detect and/or mitigate adverse events. The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased the opportunities that are brought forth by ICTs such as the adoption of online consultations by doctors and other innovative ways of providing healthcare despite public health regulations, travel restrictions, and fears tied to physical appointments. Beyond the COVID-19 era, there is a need to reimagine how ICTs could be adopted in healthcare to ensure resilience in the advent of any of these future adverse events. Building Resilient Healthcare Systems With ICTs highlights the various ways ICTs could assist in building resilience within healthcare systems and the various contexts in which resilience could be built within healthcare systems. It portrays practical implications of and value derived from building resilience in healthcare systems. Covering topics such as electronic health information systems, multimodal representation, and supply chain management, this book is an essential resource for healthcare executives, government officials, researchers, computer engineers, and academicians.

Advances in healthcare technologies have offered real-time guidance and technical assistance for diagnosis, monitoring, operation, and interventions. The development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things technology, and smart computing techniques are crucial in today’s healthcare environment as they provide frictionless and transparent financial transactions and improve the overall healthcare experience. This, in turn, has far-reaching effects on economic, psychological, educational, and organizational improvements in the way we work, teach, learn, and provide care. These advances must be studied further in order to ensure they are adapted and utilized appropriately. The Handbook of Research on Mathematical Modeling for Smart Healthcare Systems presents the latest research findings, ideas, innovations, developments, and applications in the field of modeling for healthcare systems. Furthermore, it presents the application of innovative techniques to complex problems in the case of healthcare. Covering a range of topics such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, and personalized healthcare services, this reference work is crucial for engineers, healthcare professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Lean thinking involves more than just eliminating waste; through its five guiding principles—value, value chain, continuous flow, pull production, and perfection—its successful applications are commonly found in the manufacturing sector. Although its application and benefits to companies is no longer contested, it is rare to find works that consolidate applications of lean thinking in sectors that are unconventional, such as healthcare and government. Cases on Lean Thinking Applications in Unconventional Systems allows readers to broaden their view on lean thinking applications and visualize insights for research. It presents case studies and applications of lean thinking within several different industries. Covering topics such as emergency care units, standardized work, and national humanization policy, this case book is an essential resource for engineers, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals, IT managers, government officials, students and faculty of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Over the years, the complexity of health systems has grown due to the continuous and constant introduction of new technologies—process, production, and organizational—which have increased the number of stakeholders involved, creating new relationships and new channels through which the various subjects interact. It is necessary to highlight the critical issues and opportunities relating to the innovation of the organization and governance of health services as well as the complementarity of management and leadership. The new health needs require a Copernican revolution in the organization of services: not only offering individual services but also effective permanent care of the patient within institutional and professional assistance networks and effective, efficient, and appropriate pathways. This requires that on an organizational and managerial level, the internal relationships between the branches of the healthcare companies must be reviewed and closer relationships built with the managing bodies of the social and welfare services. The Handbook of Research on Complexities, Management, and Governance in Healthcare proceeds with a reasoned reconstruction of healthcare issues through the problems connected to the complexities, management, and governance in healthcare in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. It discusses both the ethical side of health and the economic, organizational, and legal content. Covering topics such as healthcare innovation, taxation for public health, and waste disposal, this major reference work is a comprehensive resource for healthcare administration, directors, executive boards, lawyers, sociologists, government officials and policymakers, students and faculty of higher education, libraries, researchers, and academicians.

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability. This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries. In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. Resilience engineering’s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology. This book contains contributions from acknowledged international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce or eliminate the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase and improve the number of things that go right. Just as the WHO argues that health is more than the absence of illness, so does Resilient Health Care argue that safety is more than the absence of risk and accidents. This can be achieved by making use of the concrete experiences of resilience engineering, both conceptually (ways of thinking) and practically (ways of acting).

Many organizations, including government institutions and agencies, continue to increase their financial investment on information technology (IT) solutions. Despite these investments, during the global pandemic, employees and managers are either struggling or unequipped to use these tools effectively and efficiently for sustainability, competitive advantage, and decision making. Due to global pandemics, companies must harness the power of various digital channels such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence to better serve their customers and business partners. Using Information Technology Advancements to Adapt to Global Pandemics provides insights and understanding on how companies and organizations are using advances in IT to adapt to global pandemics such as COVID-19. It explores how the various IT approaches can be used for strategic purposes. Covering topics such as higher education institutions, religious organizations, and telework, this premier reference source is an essential resource for government officials, business leaders and managers, industry professionals, IT specialists, policymakers, libraries, academicians, students, and researchers.

The healthcare industry has been the center of attention recently as it continues to have a major impact on private and public organizations, government institutions, and consumers. An increasing number of requests for healthcare has led to the implementation of new policies and reform proposals that are challenging as they can have a simultaneous impact on different categories of users. As many health, individual, and organizational activities continue to grow and are conducted in the general environment, new vulnerabilities have emerged that have led to the need to study the system from a different angle. The nature, source, and complexity of healthcare is not always clear, and many times health issues are underestimated. The Handbook of Research on Healthcare Standards, Policies, and Reform examines the complex issues, various problems, and innovative solutions that are linked to healthcare standards, policies, and reform. This comprehensive reference work provides important knowledge that impacts healthcare improvement from the perspective of multiple disciplines, adding innovation value to solving health issues. Covering topics such as health protection, psychological health, and healthcare technology, it is an essential resource for academicians, healthcare practitioners, researchers, healthcare scientists, professional bodies, professors and students of higher education, and policymakers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of health data, technology, and access to health informatics. The applications of several information technologies in the context of healthcare are proving instrumental in pandemic control. These technologies were already actively used in the healthcare sector before the pandemic. However, the pandemic has resulted in researchers reassessing how these technologies could have better assisted with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and how they may mitigate the threat of future pandemics. Health Informatics and Patient Safety in Times of Crisis provides a fresh perspective on how healthcare informatics has managed the current pandemic and how improved healthcare informatics could help in a future crisis. Covering topics such as digital public health, misinformation, and knowledge management, this premier reference source is an indispensable resource for medical professionals, hospital administrators, public health officials, community leaders, international leaders, libraries, medical students, medical professors, researchers, and academicians.