Future Health Scenarios

Digital technologies is a major emerging area to invest and research in new models of health management. Future health scenarios are constituted by technologies in health and clinical decision-making systems. This book provides a unique multidisciplinary approach for exploring the potential contribution of AI and digital technologies in enabling global healthcare systems to respond to urgent twenty-first-century challenges. Deep analysis has been made regarding telemedicine using big data, deep learning, robotics, mobile and remote applications. Features: Focuses on prospective scenarios in health to predict possible futures. Addresses the urgent needs of the key population, socio-technical and health themes. Covers health innovative practices as 3D models for surgeries, big data to treat rare diseases, and AI robot for heart treatments. Explores telemedicine using big data, deep learning, robotics, mobile and remote applications. Reviews public health based on predictive analytics and disease trends. This book is aimed at researchers, professionals, and graduate students in computer science, artificial intelligence, decision support, healthcare technology management, biomedical engineering, and robotics.

How can the public health system best be organised in the future and which factors are the main determinants thereof? These are key questions in the scenario report The Future of Public Health: a Scenario Study. The report is the result of a study commissioned by the Steering Committee on Future Health Scenarios and carried out by a research team of the TNO Institute of Preventive Health Care and the STG Scenario Committee on the Future of Public Health. The report focuses on activities in collective prevention of diseases, generally known as primary prevention. The future images developed make use of two examples, the control of infectious diseases and public health for the elderly. In designing those scenarios, two sets of possible trends were combined: centralisation versus decentralisation and nationalisation versus privatisation. These combinations resulted in three scenarios; a local government scenario, a central government scenario, and a private enterprise scenario. The consequences of these future alternatives were developed in terms of their effect on organisation, policy control, financing, information supply, expertise and effectiveness. Although the report primarily focuses on the public health system in the Netherlands, the analysis of the processes examined, and the alternative scenarios based on them are also thought-provoking for readers throughout the world.

CARE AT HOME -HOME CARE Health care in the Netherlands looks to be a well structured system. Supplementing the vital level of self-care and informal care are four levels of professional care: the public health service (known in the Netherlands as basic health care) is mainly concerned with preventive work aimed at the population at large; individuals with problems can contact their general practitioner or other primary care provider, who can -depending on the problem -refer them to specialists in the cure-oriented and hospital-centred secondary sector; where necessary, patients can then be referred on to the institutions of the tertiary sector with their role in mainly long-term care. On paper this pyramidal structure appears to work well; in practice, and in particular where complex forms of care are involved, the boundaries become blurred. Medical advances and social and economic developments may delay death to ever greater ages, but disease is not defeated; and since the risk of developing chronic conditions rises with age, more and more people become incapacitated and those who do remain so for longer. This leads to a growing demand for care and compels us to reconsider patterns of provision. The need for such reconsideration is reinforced by users' changing needs and aspirations, as patients increasingly wish to be nursed and cared for in their own surroundings if at all possible. Technological advances mean that wish can often be accommodated.

The first STG report to embody scenarios on population aging, health and care appeared in 1985. This report describes developments since 1985, reviewing the current position and setting out updated scenarios. The 1985 report set out three scenarios, in which the central focus was on the developing future pattern of demand for care by the elderly. The present report too sets out three scenarios, centring on the demand for care, in which account is taken of a variety of factors; it also details four strategic scenarios whose central focus is on the developing supply of care and which set supply and demand one against the other. Three of the strategic scenarios -- emphasizing respectively intramural, extramural and informal care -- suppose the demand for care to be met in full; the fourth scenario, which rolls current policies on the care of the elderly forward into the future, pinpoints discrepancies between the need for care and the extent to which that need is likely to be met, making clear in so doing that a review of long-term policy for the elderly is urgently needed.