This volume examines how local actors respond to Africa's high dependence on donor health funds. It focuses on the large infusion of donor money to address HIV and AIDS into Malawi and Zambia and the subsequent slow-down in that funding after 2009. How do local people respond to this dynamic aid architecture and the myriad of opportunities and constraints that accompany it? This book conceptualizes dependent agency, and the condition in which local actors can simultaneously act and be dependent, and investigates conditions under which dependent agency occurs. Drawing upon empirical data from Malawi and Zambia collected between 2005 and 2014, the work interrogates the nuanced strategies of dependent agency: performances of compliance, extraversion, and resistance below the line. The findings elucidate the dynamic interactions between actors which often occur "off stage" but which undergird macro-level development processes.

That maternity staff are under pressure, with many leaving their jobs each year, is well known. Personal sacrifices, long working hours, lack of resources and an overstretched system take their toll, and occasionally staff are involved in traumatic and emotionally difficult situations. Many tolerate these conditions in the service of doing a job they love, but what happens to their mental health over time? Nurturing Maternity Staff explains how the system and individuals within it relate to each other, highlighting both the vital role compassionate leadership has in creating psychologically safe working environments, as well as tools individuals can use to optimise their own mental wellbeing. Let's dare to dream maternity services could be different.

The papers included in this volume may be categorized loosely into four general thematic sections: theoretical perspectives on the field of health care management; the role and impact of managed care; evolution of the health professions; enhancing health care organizational performance. The three papers in the first general section deal with a range of theoretical issues related to health care management, from complexity science to a theoretical comparison of integrated networks against systems, to how health care management researchers think about the research process. The three papers in the second section address the significant challenges faced by health care managers as they attempt to respond to the increasing impact of managed care. The third section's three papers look at the evolving roles of the health professions, including those of physicians as clinicians and as executives. The four papers in the final section focus on various approaches, from total quality management to use of work groups and transformational leadership, to enhancing health care organizational performance.

This volume examines the impact of wealth on quality of life and subjective well-being (SWB). As wealth is related to economic, environmental and social features of societies, this volume serves as an important resource in understanding economic and SWB. It further discusses a variety of experiences and consequences of inequalities of wealth. Through the availability of wealth data in recent international surveys, this volume explores the multiple relations between wealth and SWB. Structured around four main pillars the book presents analysis of the topic at various levels such as theoretical and conceptual, methodological and empirically, ending with a section on distribution and policies.

The complex challenges facing healthcare require innovative solutions that can make patient care more effective, easily available, and affordable. One such solution is the digital reconstruction of medicine that transitions much of patient care from hospitals, clinics, and offices to a variety of virtual settings. This reconstruction involves telemedicine, hospital-at-home services, mobile apps, remote sensing devices, clinical data analytics, and other cutting-edge technologies. The Digital Reconstruction of Healthcare: Transitioning from Brick and Mortar to Virtual Care takes a deep dive into these tools and how they can transform medicine to meet the unique needs of patients across the globe. This book enables readers to peer into the very near future and prepare them for the opportunities afforded by the digital shift in healthcare. It is also a wake-up call to readers who are less than enthusiastic about these digital tools and helps them to realize the cost of ignoring these tools. It is written for a wide range of medical professionals including: Physicians, nurses, and entrepreneurs who want to understand how to use or develop digital products and services IT managers who need to fold these tools into existing computer networks at hospitals, clinics, and medical offices Healthcare executives who decide how to invest in these platforms and products Insurers who need to stay current on the latest trends and the evidence to support their cost effectiveness Filled with insights from international experts, this book also features Dr. John Halamka's lessons learned from years of international consulting with government officials on digital health. It also taps into senior research analyst Paul Cerrato's expertise in AI, data analytics, and machine learning. Combining these lessons learned with an in-depth analysis of clinical informatics research, this book aims to separate hyped AI "solutions" from evidence-based digital tools. Together, these two pillars support the contention that these technologies can, in fact, help solve many of the seemingly intractable problems facing healthcare providers and patients.

New public health governance arrangements under the coalition government have wide reaching implications for the delivery of health inequality interventions. Through the framework of understanding health inequalities as a 'wicked problem' the book develops an applied approach to researching, understanding and addressing these by drawing on complexity theory. Case studies illuminate the text, illustrating and discussing the issues in real life terms and enabling public health, health promotion and health policy students at postgraduate level to fully understand and address the complexities of health inequalities. The book is a valuable resource on current UK public health practice for academics, researchers and public health practitioners.

This book addresses major aspects of inequity, such as access, financing, financial risk protection, gender, service delivery and utilization, in the healthcare sector in India,. Further, it discusses various measures for defining inequity in each of these aspects, and employs different indices for each dimension of inequity, which include financing, utilization, region, health outcomes, caste and class, and gender. The book covers both theoretical and empirical issues, examining fifteen major Indian States, as well as selected case studies at the district level. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, the book provides an overall view of the outcomes attributable to both economic development and policy changes per se. While providing essential data and insights for policymakers and researchers alike, the book also outlines further feasible policy changes that could potentially mitigate the current inequities in Indian healthcare. As such, it offers a valuable resource for upper graduate-level students in health economics, as well as for researchers and policymakers.

This book takes an in-depth look at the emerging technologies that are transforming the way clinicians manage patients, while at the same time emphasizing that the best practitioners use both artificial and human intelligence to make decisions. AI and machine learning are explored at length, with plain clinical English explanations of convolutional neural networks, back propagation, and digital image analysis. Real-world examples of how these tools are being employed are also discussed, including their value in diagnosing diabetic retinopathy, melanoma, breast cancer, cancer metastasis, and colorectal cancer, as well as in managing severe sepsis. With all the enthusiasm about AI and machine learning, it was also necessary to outline some of criticisms, obstacles, and limitations of these new tools. Among the criticisms discussed: the relative lack of hard scientific evidence supporting some of the latest algorithms and the so-called black box problem. A chapter on data analytics takes a deep dive into new ways to conduct subgroup analysis and how it's forcing healthcare executives to rethink the way they apply the results of large clinical trials to everyday medical practice. This re-evaluation is slowly affecting the way diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer are treated. The research discussed also suggests that data analytics will impact emergency medicine, medication management, and healthcare costs. An examination of the diagnostic reasoning process itself looks at how diagnostic errors are measured, what technological and cognitive errors are to blame, and what solutions are most likely to improve the process. It explores Type 1 and Type 2 reasoning methods; cognitive mistakes like availability bias, affective bias, and anchoring; and potential solutions such as the Human Diagnosis Project. Finally, the book explores the role of systems biology and precision medicine in clinical decision support and provides several case studies of how next generation AI is transforming patient care.

In recent years the pace of reform in health policy and the NHS has been relentless. But how are policies formed and implemented? This fully updated edition of a bestselling book explores the processes and institutions that make health policy, examining what constitutes health policy, where power lies, and what changes could be made to improve the quality of health policy making. Drawing on original research by the author over many years, and a wide range of secondary sources, the book examines the role of various institutions in the formation and implementation of health policy. Unlike most standard texts, it considers the impact of devolution in the UK and the role of European and international institutions and fills a need for an up-to-date overview of this fast-moving area. It features new case studies to illustrate how policy has evolved and developed in recent years. This new edition has been fully updated to reflect policies under the later years of New Labour and the Coalition government. Although written particularly with the needs of students and tutors in mind, this accessible textbook will also appeal to policy makers and practitioners in the health policy field.

A unique contribution to research on feminist care ethics. Drawing on a wealth of practical experience across eight different disciplinary fields, the international contributors demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking and highlight the necessity of thinking about the ethics of care within policies and practice.

It has been almost 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released the seminal report titled, Crossing the Quality Chasm. In it, the IoM identified six domains of care quality (safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centric) and noted a huge gap between the current state and the desired state. Although this report received a great deal of attention, sadly there has been little progress in these areas. In the U.S., healthcare still has huge disparities, is inefficient, and is fragmented with delays in care that are often unsafe. Most U.S. citizens are expected to suffer from a diagnostic error sometime during their lifetime, not receive a large fraction of recommended care, and pay for one of the most expensive systems in the world. Much has been written about quality improvement over the years but many prominent quality and safety experts. Yet progress has been slow. Some have called on the healthcare professions to look outside of healthcare to other industries using examples in nuclear power and airlines for safety, the hotel and entertainment industry for a 'customer' focus, and the automotive industry, particularly Toyota for efficiency (Lean). This book by Dr. Oppenheim on lean healthcare systems engineering (LHSE) is a fresh approach that brings forth concepts that systems engineers have used in huge national defense projects. What's unique in this book is that these powerful system engineering tools are modified to be able to address smaller sized healthcare problems that still involve similar problems in fragmentation and poor communication and coordination. This book is an invaluable reference for a new powerful process named Lean Healthcare Systems Engineering (LHSE) for managing workflow and care improvement projects in all clinical environments. The book applies to ambulatory clinics and hospitals of all types including operating rooms, emergency departments, and ancillary departments, clinical and imaging laboratories, pharmacies, and population health. The book presents a generic rigorous but not mathematical step-by-step process of integrated healthcare, systems engineering and Lean. The book also contains the first major product created with the LHSE process, namely tabularized summaries of representative projects in healthcare delivery applications, called Lean Enablers for Healthcare Projects. Each full-page enabler table lists the challenges and wastes, powerful improvement goals, risks, and expected benefits, and some useful descriptions of the healthcare system of interest. The book provides user-friendly solutions to major problems in healthcare delivery operations in all clinical environments, addressing fragmentation, wastes, wrong incentives, ad-hoc and stove-piped management, lack of optimized processes, hierarchy gradient, lack of systems thinking, "blaming and shaming culture", burnout of providers and many others.

This book offers a lively account of the humanitarian, economic, societal, and planetwide impacts of the pandemics, the COVID-19 pandemic included, which are traced back to as early as the 14th century plague pandemic. Placing the pandemics along with other globally shared resources, such as global warming, AI singularity, and high-risk physics experiments, each of the nine chapters of the book discusses the global health crises from a variety of unique standpoints, including infectious diseases, economics, governance, and public health. Based on the historical records of past pandemics and the rich data from the COVID-19 pandemic, a conceptual framework is presented for the economics of pandemics as a globally shared experience. This book aims to critically examine salient features in the global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including global governance, lockdowns, radical movements, and mRNA vaccines. The book will be a valuable resource to students, researchers, and policymakers who are working in the fields of environmental economics, global-scale public goods, and health economics.

There is plenty of controversy surrounding pharmaceuticals, but it cannot be denied that the pharmaceutical industry is both socially beneficial and profitable. Regulators are expected to ensure that the economic success of the industry does not come at the expense of public safety, yet they have also assumed a cooperative role by providing advice on regulation and by targeting unmet medical needs. Concerns over regulatory standards, conflicts of interest, and the manipulation of information on drug safety and effectiveness have led to public mistrust and a greater need for transparency between the pharmaceutical industry and government regulators. Transparency, Power, and Influence in the Pharmaceutical Industry evaluates the progress made in holding the pharmaceutical industry responsible for creating transparency in the industry, from development to market. The contributors to this volume examine the various mechanisms introduced to make the regulatory process more informative and situate these efforts within the larger project of enhancing the safety of drugs, vaccines, and other products.

Addressing the challenges involved in achieving standard work in health care, Getting to Standard Work in Health Care, 2nd Edition describes how to incorporate the Training Within Industry (TWI) methods of Job Instruction (JI), Job Relations (JR) and Job Methods (JM) to facilitate performance excellence and boost employee morale in a health care organization. It not only examines the TWI methodologies but also explains how this program is as vital and applicable in today's health care environment as it was when it was developed to train replacements of an industrial workforce off to fight in WWII. Placing this methodology squarely within the health care paradigm, the book uses easy-to-understanding terminology to describe how these methods can make all the difference in the delivery of quality health care. Supplying the foundation for successful Lean practice in health care, it clearly defines the role of standard work and leadership skills in relation to Lean health care. The updated text includes new case studies of current TWI usage in health care that demonstrates how to successfully roll out a sustainable TWI initiative. All new chapters on Job Relations and Job Methods give insight into the full scope of TWI skills development. Including examples of TWI application during the Covid pandemic, the book provides readers with the understanding of how to use these time-tested methodologies to improve training, increase engagement, and deliver continuous improvement in your organization.

Consumer Health Information Programs and Services: Best Practices presents examples of successful and long-standing library programs and services that provide health information to consumers-the general public, patients, and families or patients - who seek information about health and diseases. This best practices volume brings together library programs and services currently offered in hospital libraries, public libraries, academic health sciences libraries, and standalone consumer health libraries, covering a range of topics and special programs. Advice and best practices provided by these experienced CHI librarians will help readers who are planning a new consumer health information service, or who are looking to upgrade and expand their current program or service. This best practices book will highlight successful library consumer health information programs and services, offering advice and tips about all aspects of providing health information to the general public and patients, from planning and establishing a CHI program, to offering specialized services to special populations. Readers will find both solid, tried-and-true methods for providing these services, as well as guidance on using newer, updated techniques to reach persons needing health information.

Social work practitioners active among those most directly involved with persons with AIDS/HIV need guidance and support. This volume offers both in a balanced analysis of key issues relating to their practice. The authors clearly and authoritatively establish that the demographics of the AIDS/HIV crisis are undergoing change rapidly and alarmingly.

Although there have been significant advances in education about AIDS and modifications in sexual practices among gay men resulting in a lowered rate of new infection, other groups are shown to be evidencing explosive levels of infection. Not only are the population parameters of AIDS defined, but the fundamental issues of social service delivery are addressed as are the special needs of the newly at-risk groups. Women, adolescents, substance abusers, minorities, and the mentally ill are all in the demographic patterns describing AIDS/HIV diffusion. The most compelling AIDS care issues are directly focused on and practical guidance is given to social work practitioners. AIDS/HIV poses a sometimes daunting challenge threatening to overwhelm service providers. This book will be of value due to its sensitive, insightful, experience-based guidance at the level of practice. It will also prove a useful resource for all in the caring professions who will appreciate its timely explanation of the complexities involved in framing effective responses to current and emerging needs associated with AIDS/HIV.

Accurate estimation, diagnosis, and prevention of COVID-19 is a global challenge for healthcare organizations. Innovative measures can introduce and implement AI, and Mathematical Modeling applications. This book provides insight into the recent advances of applications, statistical methods, and mathematical modeling for the healthcare industry. This book covers the state-of-the-art applications of AI and Machine Learning in past epidemics, pandemics, and COVID-19. It offers recent global case studies, and discusses how AI and statistical methods, initiatives, and applications such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Correlation and Regression Analysis play a major role in the prediction, diagnosis, and prevention of a pandemic. It will also focus on how AI and statistical applications can facilitate and restructure the healthcare system. This book is written for Researchers, Students, Professionals, Executives, and the general public.

How Doctors Think defines the nature and importance of clinical judgment. Although physicians make use of science, this book argues that medicine is not itself a science but rather an interpretive practice that relies on clinical reasoning. A physician looks at the patient's history along with the presenting physical signs and symptoms and juxtaposes these with clinical experience and empirical studies to construct a tentative account of the illness.
How Doctors Think is divided into four parts. Part one introduces the concept of medicine as a practice rather than a science; part two discusses the idea of causation; part three delves into the process of forming clinical judgment; and part four considers clinical judgment within the uncertain nature of medicine itself. In How Doctors Think, Montgomery contends that assuming medicine is strictly a science can have adverse side effects, and suggests reducing these by recognizing the vital role of clinical judgment.

Through the framework of understanding health inequalities as a 'wicked problem' the book develops an applied approach to researching, understanding and addressing them by drawing on complexity theory. Case studies illuminate the text, illustrating and discussing the issues in real life terms and enabling public health, health promotion and health policy students to understand and address the complexities of health inequalities.

Blockchain technology is poised to revolutionize more than just payment and crypto-currency. Many vertical industries will be reshaped by the new trusted data models enabled and inspired by the blockchain - healthcare is no exception. In fact, healthcare may hold the greatest opportunities for meaningful use of the technology. Early pioneers have explored some of the first use cases for medical payments, electronic health records, HIPAA/data privacy, drug counterfeiting, and credentialing of healthcare professionals. We have only begun to scratch the surface in how to automate the complexities of today's healthcare systems and design new systems which focus on trust, transparency and the alignment of incentives. Metcalf, Bass, Dhillon, and Hooper have curated a collection of examples based on the fundamentals of blockchain that build upon the early successes and examples that point to the future. After a brief introduction to bitcoin, blockchain and the protocols available, a getting-started guide is presented specific to health and healthcare. The authors discuss the complexities and possibilities of smart contracts and some of the early consortia that are exploring the possibilities. Examples and use cases are found throughout the book, with specific sections that cover the more sophisticated and far-reaching examples which have the potential to scale at the industry-level. In addition, a discussion of integrating blockchain technology into other advanced healthcare trends and IT systems - such as telemedicine, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, value-based payments , patient engagement solutions, big data solutions, medical tourism, and precision medicine/genetic therapies among many others are presented. The final section provides a glimpse into the future using blockchain technology and examples of research projects that are still in labs across the globe. The appendices may prove particularly useful for additional details on how to get started, including resources and organizations specifically focusing on blockchain and distributed ledger solutions.

Validation of computer systems is the process that assures the formal assessment and report of quality and performance measures for all the life-cycle stages of software and system development, its implementation, qualification and acceptance, operation, modification, requalification, maintenance and retirement (PICS CSV PI 011-3). It is a process that demonstrates the compliance of computer systems functional and non-functional requirements, data integrity, regulated company procedures and safety requirements, industry standards, and applicable regulatory authority's requirements. Compliance is a state of being in adherence to application-related standards or conventions or regulations in laws and similar prescriptions. This book, which is relevant to the pharmaceutical and medical devices regulated operations, provides practical information to assist in the computer validation to production systems, while highlighting and efficiently integrating worldwide regulation into the subject. A practical approach is presented to increase efficiency and to ensure that the validation of computer systems is correctly achieved.

A multiplicity of factors converging together suggest the long term/post-acute care (LTPAC) provider community (e.g. nursing homes, behavioral health facilities, home health agencies, etc.) will accelerate in importance within the healthcare ecosystem during the next few years. The challenge for many LTPAC providers in this emerging environment will be to advance their clinical health information technologies (health IT) capabilities in order to "play" with other providers in the healthcare "sandbox." This book is designed to assist LTPAC leaders in identifying and exploring the array of critical issues one needs to consider in order to operate within an advanced clinical health IT ecosystem. This book surveys key issues surrounding the use of clinical health IT in LTPAC settings, to include providing readers with a suggested strategic plan and roadmap for selecting and installing digital health technologies in LTPAC organizations. Though the focus of the book primarily centers on the U.S. LTPAC provider's experience, the authors also spend time addressing global and future LTPAC considerations.

Healthcare transformation requires us to continually look at new and better ways to manage insights - both within and outside the organization today. Increasingly, the ability to glean and operationalize new insights efficiently as a byproduct of an organization's day-to-day operations is becoming vital to hospitals and health systems ability to survive and prosper. One of the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics has been the ability to deal with the sheer variety and volume of disparate healthcare data and the increasing need to derive veracity and value out of it. Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare investigates how healthcare organizations can leverage this tapestry of big data to discover new business value, use cases, and knowledge as well as how big data can be woven into pre-existing business intelligence and analytics efforts. This book focuses on teaching you how to: Develop skills needed to identify and demolish big-data myths Become an expert in separating hype from reality Understand the V's that matter in healthcare and why Harmonize the 4 C's across little and big data Choose data fi delity over data quality Learn how to apply the NRF Framework Master applied machine learning for healthcare Conduct a guided tour of learning algorithms Recognize and be prepared for the future of artificial intelligence in healthcare via best practices, feedback loops, and contextually intelligent agents (CIAs) The variety of data in healthcare spans multiple business workflows, formats (structured, un-, and semi-structured), integration at point of care/need, and integration with existing knowledge. In order to deal with these realities, the authors propose new approaches to creating a knowledge-driven learning organization-based on new and existing strategies, methods and technologies. This book will address the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics and provide pragmatic recommendations on how to deal with them.

This book is all about dementia in Ireland and what has and has not been happening in a country where dementia has been a taboo topic for so long. In particular it examines the dementia landscape since late 2014, following the launch of Ireland's first National Dementia Strategy. A lot has happened in Ireland since that time but a lot more needs to happen for people to live well with dementia and have their human rights upheld. There are an estimated 55,000 Irish people living with dementia and these figures are set to triple by 2050. Although topics explored in the book,such as obtaining a diagnosis, accessing home care services and moving from home into a nursing home relate to Ireland, they are discussed against the backdrop of policy, practice and research developments in dementia in other parts of the world. In this way the book provides the reader with a wealth of information including research evidence, best practice guidelines and international expertise. The book has been dedicated to Mnanah 'Eireann, in recognition of the hard physical and emotional work, caregivers,mostly women do behind closed doors. Throughout the book, an appeal is made for more state support to be given to these formal and informal caregivers.

The Economics of Faith-Based Service Delivery provides the first ever comprehensive empirical assessment of the role that faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) play in the supply of health care and education services in sub-Saharan Africa. Wodon focuses on estimating the market share, reach to the poor, and cost for households that rely on FIIs as opposed to public and private secular providers of education and health care services. He also analyzes the causes of user reliance on FIIs, the comparative performance of FIIs, and the level of satisfaction among those that use their services. The Economics of Faith-Based Service Delivery is an innovate combination of previously untapped nationally representative household surveys, qualitative fieldwork, and insights from the fields of religious studies and social economics.