Disparities in healthcare arise when there is an imbalance between opportunities to achieve optimal healthcare with access, education, and financial means. However, the difficult subject of health disparities in healthcare and its historical origins demonstrate that culture and race may contribute to health crises of minority groups within the United States. Educating vulnerable populations on making lifestyle modifications and reducing stress without educating healthcare professionals about increasing their awareness of hidden biases, prejudgment, and discrimination, will allow health disparities to remain. Examining and Solving Health Disparities in the United States: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical reference book that provides discussion on the topic of inequities in healthcare that impact health disparities and serves to increase awareness on these issues. The author particularly explores health disparities from a unifying perspective that supports the understanding of why health disparities occur and how an increase in the awareness, education, and confrontation of discriminatory acts can help make changes at the organizational and societal levels. Covering topics that include cultural clashes, equity, healthcare delivery, and healthcare accessibility, this book is essential for government officials, policymakers, medical administrators, medical professionals, medical boards and directors, researchers, academicians, and students involved in gender studies, cultural studies, social justice, socioeconomics, ethics and law, government, medicine, public health, psychology, sociology, and more.

You Don't Have to Do It Alone

Whether you're prepared for it or not, chances are you'll take on the role of caregiver when a family member or friend is affected by a serious illness or injury, or when you find your elderly parent needs help. As you'll soon discover, the range of tasks and responsibilities involved are overwhelming. "Share The Care" offers a sensible and loving solution: a unique group approach that can turn a circle of ordinary people into a powerful caregiving team. "Share The Care" shows you how to:

• Create a caregiver "family" from friends, real family members, neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances.
• Hold a meeting to organize your group, and introduce members to the Share The Care systems that guarantee every job will be done and no one person will have to do too much.
• Discover the hidden talents within the group, make the most of their resources, cope with group issues, and stay together in the face of adversity.

Included here are valuable guidelines, compassionate suggestions, and a simple-to-use workbook section that together offer support to free the patient from worry and the caregivers from burnout. "Share The Care" offers friends and family the best answer ever to the frequently asked question "What can I do?"

The world of medical technologies is undergoing a sea of change in the domain of consumer culture. Having a grasp on what appeals to consumers and how consumers are making purchasing decisions is essential to the success of any organization that thrives by offering a product or service. As such, it is vital to examine the consumer-centered aspects of medical technological developments that have a patient-centered focus and allow patients to take part in their own personal health and wellness. Consumer-Driven Technologies in Healthcare: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a critical source of academic knowledge on the use of smartphones and other technological devices for cancer therapy, fitness and wellness, chronic disease monitoring, and other areas. The tracking of these items using technology has allowed consumers to take control of their own healthcare. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as clinical decision support systems, patient engagement, and electronic health records, this publication is an ideal reference source for doctors, nurse practitioners, hospital administrators, medical professionals, IT professionals, academicians, and researchers interested in advancing medical practice through technology.

Since the first edition of Who Shall Live? (1974), over 100,000 students, teachers, physicians, and general readers from more than a dozen fields have found this book to be a reader-friendly, authoritative introduction to economic concepts applied to health and medical care.Health care is by far the largest industry in the United States. It is three times larger than education and five times as large as national defense. In 2001, Americans spent over $12,500 per person for hospitals, physicians, drugs and other health care services and goods. Other high-income democracies spend one third less, enjoy three more years of life expectancy, and have more equal access to medical care.In this book, each of the chapters of the original edition is followed by supplementary readings on such subjects as: 'Social Determinants of Health: Caveats and Nuances', 'The Structure of Medical Education — It's Time For a Change', and 'How to Save $1 Trillion Out of Health Care'.The ten years following publication of the 2nd expanded edition in 2011 were arguably more turbulent for US health and health care than any other ten-year period since World War II. They span the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the deepening opioid epidemic, and the physical, psychological, and socio-economic traumas of the Covid-19 pandemic.An important new contribution to this book is to describe and analyze the changes in five sections: 'The Affordable Care Act and the Uninsured', 'Health care Expenditures', 'Health Outcomes', 'The Covid-19 Pandemic', and 'Health and Politics'. This part includes 24 tables and figures.This book will be welcomed by students, professionals, and life-long learners to gain increased understanding of the relation between health, economics, and social choice.

The internet of things (IoT) has had a major impact on academic and industrial fields. Applying these technologies to healthcare systems reduces medical costs while enriching the patient-centric approach to medicine, allowing for better overall healthcare proficiency. However, usage of IoT in healthcare is still suffering from significant challenges with respect to the cost and accuracy of medical sensors, non-standard IoT system architectures, assorted wearable devices, the huge volume of generated data, and interoperability issues. Incorporating the Internet of Things in Healthcare Applications and Wearable Devices is an essential publication that examines existing challenges and provides solutions for building smart healthcare systems with the latest IoT-enabled technology and addresses how IoT improves the proficiency of healthcare with respect to wireless sensor networks. While highlighting topics including mobility management, sensor integration, and data analytics, this book is ideally designed for computer scientists, bioinformatics analysts, doctors, nurses, hospital executives, medical students, IT specialists, software developers, computer engineers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on how these emerging wireless technologies improve efficiency within the healthcare domain.

Despite the development of environmental initiatives, healthcare, and cultural assimilation in today's global market, significant problems in these areas remain throughout various regions of the world. As countries continue to transition into the modern age, areas across Asia and Africa have begun implementing modern solutions in order to benefit their individual societies and keep pace with the surrounding world. Significant research is needed in order to understand current issues that persist across the globe and what is being done to solve them. Global Issues and Innovative Solutions in Healthcare, Culture, and the Environment is an essential reference source that discusses worldwide conflicts within healthcare and environmental development as well as modern resolutions that are being implemented. Featuring research on topics such as health insurance reform, sanitation development, and cultural freedom, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policymakers, physicians, government officials, sociologists, environmentalists, anthropologists, academicians, practitioners, and students seeking coverage on global societal challenges in the modern age.

Tele-audiology, a blanket term for digital health solutions in audiology and auditory rehabilitation, including education and training, has recently been gaining pace, partly driven by commercial developments in remote otoscopy, remote audiometry, and hearing aids that can be adjusted by a remote professional. Due to these advances, clinicians have the potential to expand their practices and better serve patients in rural areas. However, audiologists are reluctant to use tele-audiology. Tele-Audiology and the Optimization of Hearing Healthcare Delivery is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of technologies that advance audiology and auditory rehabilitation, and allows healthcare providers to offer hearing healthcare at a distance and in a manner that provides appropriate outcomes and reduces delivery costs. This publication examines research findings from real-world experience of tele-audiology and covers topics including eHealth, security management, and internet interventions. It is ideally designed for audiologists, speech pathologists, care providers, medical professionals, academicians, and researchers.

This lucid and comprehensive book explores the ways in which the State, the market and the citizen can collaborate to satisfy people's health care needs. It argues that health care is not a commodity like any other. It asks if its unique properties mean that there is a role for social regulation and political management. Apples and oranges can be left to the buyers and the sellers. Health care may require an input from the consensus, the experts, the insurers, the politicians and the bureaucrats as well. David Reisman makes a fresh contribution to the debate. He argues that the three policy issues that are of primary importance are choice, equality and cost. He explores the balance between the patient, the practitioner and public opinion; the disparities in outcome indicators and access to medical care; and the escalation in prices and quantities at the expense of other areas of social life. Reisman concludes that, despite its significance for the individual and the nation, there is no single definition of health or health care. The maximand is a mix. Yet decisions have to be made. This thought-provoking and insightful book will be of use to students and scholars of public policy, social policy and health economics. It will also be of interest to medical practitioners who want to situate hard choices about health and illness in a broad multidisciplinary context.

The outbreak of global health issues due to rapid urbanization, industrialization, and changing climatic conditions are severely impacting health and lifestyle. Yet, healthcare and medical services continue to increase in cost in developed nations. This can result in medical tourism, wherein patients travel across countries in order to benefit from medical treatment that might not be accessible in the traveler's nation of origin. Developing countries are prepared to capitalize on this growing industry by offering multi-specialty healthcare hospitals, cost-effective treatments, and the promotion of online medical consultancy. Global Developments in Healthcare and Medical Tourism provides innovative insights into issues impacting healthcare services, healthcare service providers, government policies, and initiatives for health reforms and explores low-cost medical tourism destinations and practices. The book additionally seeks to deliver high-quality, cost-efficient smart healthcare applications. The content within this publication examines global health, wellness tourism, and global business and is designed for students, researchers, academicians, policymakers, government officials, medical practitioners, and industry professionals.

While many fields such as e-learning, business, and marketing have taken advantage of the potential of gamification, the healthcare domain has just started to exploit this emerging trend, still in an ad-hoc fashion. Despite the huge potential of applying gamification on several topics of healthcare, there are scarce theoretical studies regarding methodologies, techniques, specifications, and frameworks. These applications must be examined further as they can be used to solve major healthcare-related challenges such as care plan maintenance, medication adherence, phobias treatment, or patient education. Handbook of Research on Solving Modern Healthcare Challenges With Gamification aims to share new approaches and methodologies to build e-health solutions using gamification and identifies new trends on this topic from pedagogical strategies to technological approaches. This book serves as a collection of knowledge that builds the theoretical foundations that can be helpful in creating sustainable e-health solutions in the future. While covering topics such as augmented and virtual reality, ethical issues in gamification, e-learning, telehealth services, and digital applications, this book is essential for research scholars, healthcare/computer science teachers and students pursuing healthcare/computer science-related subjects, enterprise developers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest developments and research solving healthcare challenges with modern e-health solutions using gamification.

While digital transformations are happening in all walks of society and business, there is real potential for improving the quality of life of the elderly using digital methods and tools. Digital health promises to deliver better healthcare quality cost-efficiently to more people, especially in the case of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes. It will achieve this by combining the benefits of telehealth, eHealth, data-driven personalised healthcare, and evidence-based care. This book presents a discussion of evolving digital technologies, such as smart phones and assisted living, and innovative digitally based services that are helping improve the quality and cost of healthcare for the elderly. This book evolved from a recent multi-country and multi-disciplinary initiative called Digital Health for the Ageing Population. This project (2019-2021) aimed at promoting general awareness of digital health for ageing populations with collaborative research across several countries including Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, Norway, The Netherlands, and USA. With its international scope and detailed coverage of relevant digital methods and tools, this book will benefit healthcare technologists, ICT developers, managers of healthcare and mobile healthcare projects, and academic researchers working in related fields.

Increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) is being deployed in many hospitals and healthcare settings to help improve health care service delivery. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) tools can help guide physicians with tasks such as diagnosis and detection of diseases and assisting with medical decision making. This edited book outlines novel applications of AI in e-healthcare. It includes various real-time/offline applications and case studies in the field of e-Healthcare, such as image recognition tools for assisting with tuberculosis diagnosis from x-ray data, ML tools for cancer disease prediction, and visualisation techniques for predicting the outbreak and spread of Covid-19. Heterogenous recurrent convolution neural networks for risk prediction in electronic healthcare record datasets are also reviewed. Suitable for an audience of computer scientists and healthcare engineers, the main objective of this book is to demonstrate effective use of AI in healthcare by describing and promoting innovative case studies and finding the scope for improvement across healthcare services.

The complex, highly problematic, often thorny dynamics of trust and authority are central to the anthropological study of legitimacy. In this book, this sine qua non runs across the in-depth examination of the ways in which healthcare and public health are managed by the authorities and experienced by the people on the ground in urban Europe, the USA, India, Africa, Latin America and the Far and Middle East. This book brings comparatively together anthropological studies on healthcare and public health rigorously based on in-depth empirical knowledge. Inspired by the current debate on legitimacy, legitimation and de-legitimation, the contributions do not refrain from taking into account the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the health systems under study, but carefully avoid letting this issue monopolise the discussion. This book raises key challenges to our understanding of healthcare practices and the governance of public health. With a keen eye on urban life, its inequalities and the ever-expanding gap between rulers and the ruled, the findings address important questions on the complex ways in which authorities gain, keep, or lose the public’s trust.

Risk Adjustment, Risk Sharing and Premium Regulation in Health Insurance Markets: Theory and Practice describes the goals, design and evaluation of health plan payment systems. Part I contains 5 chapters discussing the role of health plan payment in regulated health insurance markets, key aspects of payment design (i.e. risk adjustment, risk sharing and premium regulation), and evaluation methods using administrative data on medical spending. Part II contains 14 chapters describing the health plan payment system in 14 countries and sectors around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Chile, China, Columbia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. Authors discuss the evolution of these payment schemes, along with ongoing reforms and key lessons on the design of health plan payment.

The healthcare sector has never been under as much pressure as it is today. This pressure has motivated organizations to reinvent themselves, forcing management and marketing to take a more active role. Due to this reinvention, organizations must incorporate a stronger culture of management and marketing orientation that allows companies to define their course, optimize their resources, communicate with their stakeholders more efficiently, and encourage customers to become more involved with the company. This need is particularly urgent in the healthcare sector, as its weight in the economy has grown recently and it must prepare for economic recovery. Management and Marketing for Improved Competitiveness and Performance in the Healthcare Sector provides knowledge and skills to apply management and marketing on strategic, tactical, and operational aspects with an emphasis on the healthcare industry. Various aspects of management and marketing, such as operations management, quality management, human resources, brand management, and digital marketing, are discussed. The book is ideal for management and marketing academics, their students (undergraduate/graduate programs), researchers, managers, advertisers, healthcare organizations, hospital boards, pharmaceutical representatives, and marketers who need to optimize the potential of management marketing applied in the healthcare industry.

One of the key issues the world grappled with during Covid-19 was the distributional implications of lockdowns globally. The shadow of lockdown policies continues when nations still try to emerge out of the pandemic. Heterogeneity herein over time, country and even within nations in policy making resulted in unintended consequences and debates between citizens, scientists, policy makers and civil society. Responses to Covid-19 meanwhile tried to balance a long run approach which involved the health sector, built on an innovation-oriented mindset and kept in mind the broader economic implications of policy decisions for the future.Flattening the Curve is an effort to summarize these learnings from Covid-19, especially for future pandemics in this age of zoonotic diseases and the Anthropocene. Assembling scholars, scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs from across a variety of fields, this edited volume brings an interdisciplinary understanding to how the world can better respond socially to pandemics. It should be of immense value for students, scholars, policy makers and researchers in public policy, global health, economics, science and innovation policy, as well as regulation and business.

Advancements in medical and healthcare technologies pave the way to improving treatments and diagnoses while also streamlining processes to ensure the highest quality care is given to patients. In the last few decades, revolutionary technology has radically progressed the healthcare industry by increasing life expectancy and reducing human error. Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Medicine and Healthcare provides emerging research on bioinformatics, medical ethics, and clinical science in modern applications and settings. While highlighting the challenges medical practitioners and healthcare professionals face when treating patients and striving to optimize their processes, the book shows how revolutionary technologies and methods are vastly improving how healthcare is implemented globally. This book is an important resource for medical researchers, healthcare administrators, doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers, and students looking for comprehensive research on the advancements in healthcare technologies.