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.

Featuring contributed chapters written by practitioners, scholars, researchers, and students within the health care discipline, Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice: International Approaches at the Micro, Meso, and Macro Levels assists readers in expanding their knowledge, ability, understanding, and perspectives regarding interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice (CP). The book provides readers with international, system-based approaches, emphasizes applications at all levels, and includes examples of student-led initiatives. The book highlights international IPE and CP methods, models, programs, and initiatives that emphasize preparation for collaborative practice across the continuum of care in a variety of settings. Readers are presented with conceptual and theoretical models; enlightening case studies; macro briefs that illustrate the design, development, and implementation of global, regional, and/or local IPE and CP initiatives; and explorations of student-led IPE initiatives. The contributed chapters well define micro, meso, and macro levels and highlight the ways in which IPE and CP initiatives and programs are applied to each. Designed to increase readers' knowledge and foster greater levels of collaboration, Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice is an ideal resource for health care students, professionals, educator, administrators, researchers, and policymakers.

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.

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 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.

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living. The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada - an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada's capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion - on force and on fear - to secure that subordination. From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics - of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.

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.

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.

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.

Virtually all fiscal measures influence people's health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. The purpose of this book is to discuss the subject of these measures, which we define as 'health taxes'. The book aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, we build an argument throughout the book for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.

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.

This open access book offers the first in-depth study of the history and current debates surrounding electronic cigarettes comparing the UK, US and Australia. Since their introduction, e-cigarettes have been the subject of much public, media and regulatory attention, with discussion centring on whether these devices encourage or discourage smoking. This study delves into the history of policymaking and institutions in three countries which have taken different approaches to the regulation of e-cigarettes. In the UK, the tradition of harm reduction through nicotine has helped form a response which has endorsed e-cigarettes, though not without considerable controversy. In contrast, the US has a cessation-only anti-tobacco agenda, and Australia has effectively banned e-cigarettes. This book argues that each country frames the long-term use of nicotine differently and prioritises the health of different groups within the population of smokers or non-smokers, set against a broad backdrop of national responses to addiction. By taking this comparative approach, the authors explore the relationship between history, evidence and policy in public health more widely.

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.

With advancing technology and the digitization of the modern era, businesses are required to adopt the latest innovations computer science and information technology have to offer. The field of home healthcare must utilize the finest available operations management systems in order to remain relevant in a globalized world while also providing the best treatment possible to its patients. Transportation, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management in Home Healthcare: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that provides theoretical and empirical research on logistics management and transportation and scheduling routing and their applications in home healthcare and logistics. While highlighting topics such as hybrid energy, scheduling optimization, and forecasting techniques, this book is ideally designed for outpatient doctors and nurses, transportation professionals, logisticians, home healthcare managers, computer scientists, logistic engineers, health practitioners, academicians, researchers, and students.

Hospital funding plays an important role in strengthening healthcare and medical resources. Utilizing comprehensive costing systems to accommodate clinical and financial data leads to improved patient care both clinically and financially. Clinical Costing Techniques and Analysis in Modern Healthcare Systems provides innovative insights into the connections between statistical information and financial systems within clinical settings. The content within this publication delves into business intelligence, clinical decision making, and electronic health records. It is geared towards medical practitioners and professionals, hospital administrators, and researchers seeking valuable insights centered on clinical variations of healthcare data as well as the role of information systems in linking productivity and performance management.

Inside today's data-driven personalized medicine, and the time, effort, and information required from patients to make it a reality Medicine has been personal long before the concept of "personalized medicine" became popular. Health professionals have always taken into consideration the individual characteristics of their patients when diagnosing, and treating them. Patients have cared for themselves and for each other, contributed to medical research, and advocated for new treatments. Given this history, why has the notion of personalized medicine gained so much traction at the beginning of the new millennium? Personalized Medicine investigates the recent movement for patients' involvement in how they are treated, diagnosed, and medicated; a movement that accompanies the increasingly popular idea that people should be proactive, well-informed participants in their own healthcare. While it is often the case that participatory practices in medicine are celebrated as instances of patient empowerment or, alternatively, are dismissed as cases of patient exploitation, Barbara Prainsack challenges these views to illustrate how personalized medicine can give rise to a technology-focused individualism, yet also present new opportunities to strengthen solidarity. Facing the future, this book reveals how medicine informed by digital, quantified, and computable information is already changing the personalization movement, providing a contemporary twist on how medical symptoms or ailments are shared and discussed in society. Bringing together empirical work and critical scholarship from medicine, public health, data governance, bioethics, and digital sociology, Personalized Medicine analyzes the challenges of personalization driven by patient work and data. This compelling volume proposes an understanding that uses novel technological practices to foreground the needs and interests of patients, instead of being ruled by them.

Implementation of guidelines in the health system is a major undertaking, especially in developing countries. An important constraint in guideline development in developing countries is that the guideline recommendations must suit local conditions and must make use of available resources. This is a challenge because the health systems of developing countries have a high burden of disease and little resources; therefore, guidelines must rely on cost-effective healthcare interventions. The BACIS program study was initiated to address some of these challenges in the dissemination and utilization of maternal health guidelines. The BACIS program was piloted, and the results showed that the BACIS program could assist in improving compliance of nurses with the national maternity care guidelines. This is an impressive finding and step forward for maternal healthcare in developing countries. Developing Maternal Health Decision Support Systems in Developing Countries discusses public health aspects of the design and implementation of clinical decision support systems in developing country contexts. Specifically, it focuses largely on the design and evaluation of the BACIS program in South Africa. This is supplemented with a conversation on the possible future research directions in the BACIS program study along with the outlook for clinical decision support systems in developing country contexts in general. This book is ideal for e-health system designers and implementers, managers and policymakers in the area of e-health in developing countries, personnel from NPOs and donor agencies, government officials, IT consultants, medical professionals, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in how decision support systems such as BACIS are being used to improve maternal health in developing countries.

Health Care Today in the United States details the complexities of health care in the United States and provides readers with up-to-date information on the state of health care, its challenges, and how to navigate the system. Sections cover patient populations, diverse cultures, legalities, the opioid epidemic, the impact of COVID-19, health care costs, insurance and the impact of technology on health care. Written for students seeking a health science degree, as well as health care professionals, nurses, medical students, and those in the field of public health, this book provides a comprehensive view of health care in the U.S.