Systems Analysis Tools For Better Health Care Delivery

This book presents some recent systems engineering and mathematical tools for health care along with their real-world applications by health care practitioners and engineers. Advanced approaches, tools, and algorithms used in operating room scheduling and patient flow are covered. State-of-the-art results from applications of data mining, business process modeling, and simulation in healthcare, together with optimization methods, form the core of the volume. Systems Analysis Tools for Better Health Care Delivery illustrates the increased need of partnership between engineers and health care professionals. This book will benefit researchers and practitioners in health care delivery institutions, staff members and professionals of specialized hospital units, and lecturers and graduate students in engineering, applied mathematics, business administration and health care.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2015, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in August/September 2015. The 21 regular papers, 7 short papers and 2 inductrial papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on runtime process management, process modeling, process modeling discovery, business process models and analytics, BPM in industry, process compliance and deviations, energing and practical areas of BPM, and process monitoring.

This book presents extended versions of papers originally presented and discussed at the 3rd International Doctoral Symposium on Applied Computation and Security Systems (ACSS 2016) held from August 12 to 14, 2016 in Kolkata, India. The symposium was jointly organized by the AGH University of Science & Technology, Cracow, Poland; Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy; and the University of Calcutta, India. The book is divided into two volumes, Volumes 3 and 4, and presents dissertation works in the areas of Image Processing, Biometrics-based Authentication, Soft Computing, Data Mining, Next-Generation Networking and Network Security, Remote Healthcare, Communications, Embedded Systems, Software Engineering and Service Engineering. The first two volumes of the book published the works presented at the ACSS 2015, which was held from May 23 to 25, 2015 in Kolkata, India.

The book reports on advanced theories and methods in two related engineering fields: electrical and electronic engineering, and communications engineering and computing. It highlights areas of global and growing importance, such as renewable energy, power systems, mobile communications, security and the Internet of Things (IoT). The contributions cover a number of current research issues, including smart grids, photovoltaic systems, wireless power transfer, signal processing, 4G and 5G technologies, IoT applications, mobile cloud computing and many more. Based on the proceedings of the first International Conference on Emerging Trends in Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering (ELECOM 2016), held in Voila Bagatelle, Mauritius from November 25 to 27, 2016, the book provides graduate students, researchers and professionals with a snapshot of the state-of-the-art and a source of new ideas for future research and collaborations.

In a joint effort between the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, this books attempts to bridge the knowledge/awareness divide separating health care professionals from their potential partners in systems engineering and related disciplines. The goal of this partnership is to transform the U.S. health care sector from an underperforming conglomerate of independent entities (individual practitioners, small group practices, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, community health centers et. al.) into a high performance "system" in which every participating unit recognizes its dependence and influence on every other unit. By providing both a framework and action plan for a systems approach to health care delivery based on a partnership between engineers and health care professionals, Building a Better Delivery System describes opportunities and challenges to harness the power of systems-engineering tools, information technologies and complementary knowledge in social sciences, cognitive sciences and business/management to advance the U.S. health care system.

This book represents a first effort at bringing together a variety of systems theories and techniques and exploring their practical applicability to the health care system. It should have broad appeal both as an introductory reference work for health professionals unfamiliar with systems approaches and as a review of new techniques for those already working in this field. The papers collected in this work, presented at the Symposium on Systems and Medical Care held at Harvard in 1968, were written by the editors and other specialists in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, public health, and business administration. Each one deals individually with specific systems issues and professional approaches. Beginning with a general overview of systems concepts (general systems, systems analysis, and cybernetics) and recent literature relevant to health care, the book proceeds to discuss basic systems models of disease and medical care; the recent evolution of the medical care system; some specific interorganizational systems models; utility and application of systems analysis techniques and concepts in health; health systems planning; and processes and evaluation of change in systems. In a concluding essay, the editors summarize the various topics discussed and focus attention on some of the current problems and issues facing this emergent field.