This issue of Nursing Clinics of North America will focus on Magnet Hospitals. Article topics will include nursing workforce data on magnet versus non-magnet hospitals, magnet culture and satisfaction, best practices in ensuring engagement among nurses, nursing retention, partnerships between academics and practice, and nursing retention strategies.

This book collects several contributions, written both by statisticians and medical doctors, which focus on the identification of new diagnostic, therapeutic and organizational strategies in order to improve the occurrence of clinical outcomes for Acute Coronary Syndromes (ACS) patients. The work is structured in two different parts: the first one is focused on cooperative project mainly on statistical analysis of large clinical and administrative databases; the second one faces the development of innovative diagnostic techniques, with specific reference to genetic and proteomic, and the evolution of new imaging techniques for the early identification of patients at major risk of thrombotic, arrhythmic complications and at risk of poor revascularization.

This book examines the extent to which social position impacts exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) and whether women with IPV exposure are more vulnerable to social inequities in health. At the intersection of sociological theories on health, gender, and policy, this book explores these issues against the social policy contexts of the United States, Germany, and Norway. It applies a conceptual framework which argues that differential exposure to IPV and differential vulnerability to poor health are two primary mechanisms driving health inequities for IPV survivors. Empirical analysis reveals context-specific nuances in the interactions of social position and IPV exposure in their impact on health, and suggests that encouraging women's economic independence and ensuring access to health care are vital policy intervention points for reducing the health inequities of IPV survivors. This book offers a cross-national comparative look at the role of social policy in the lives of IPV survivors, highlighting the effects of various policy approaches in three modern welfare states and suggesting policy implications.

Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity examines the complexities involved in managing resources in our healthcare system and explains how management theory and informatics applications can increase efficiencies in various functional areas of healthcare services. Delving into data and project management and advanced analytics, this book details and provides supporting evidence for the strategic concepts that are critical to achieving successful healthcare information technology (HIT), information management, and electronic health record (EHR) applications. This includes the vital importance of involving nursing staff in rollouts, engaging physicians early in any process, and developing a more receptive organizational culture to digital information and systems adoption. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to do all we can to make our healthcare systems work smarter, be more effective, and reach more people. The power to know is at our fingertips; we need only embrace it. -From the foreword by James H. Goodnight, PhD, CEO, SAS Bridging the gap from theory to practice, it discusses actual informatics applications that have been incorporated by various healthcare organizations and the corresponding management strategies that led to their successful employment. Offering a wealth of detail, it details several working projects, including: A computer physician order entry (CPOE) system project at a North Carolina hospital E-commerce self-service patient check-in at a New Jersey hospital The informatics project that turned a healthcare system's paper-based resources into digital assets Projects at one hospital that helped reduce excesses in length of stay, improved patient safety; and improved efficiency with an ADE alert system A healthcare system's use of algorithms to identify patients at risk for hepatitis Offering the guidance that healthcare specialists need to make use of various informatics platforms, this book provides the motivation and the proven methods that can be adapted and applied to any number of staff, patient, or regulatory concerns.

In the fast-paced world of health care clinical effectiveness relies not only upon medical, but also administrative competence. This issue of Neurologic Clinics features 14 articles from experts in their respective areas of office management. Articles include practice and compensation models; negotiating with payers; using benchmarks; web based neurology resources (clinical); web based neurology resources (practice management); use of electronic health records in neurology practice; hot topics in risk management; HIPPA and other regulatory issues; ethical issues; new concepts in residency and fellowship training; using evidence based medicine; P4P and PQRI; patient education; and the future of neurology.

IT in Pharmacy: An Integrated Approach aims to describe and discuss the major areas of pharmacy IT innovation (e-prescribing, drug databases, electronic patient records, clinical decision support, pharmacy management systems, robots and automation etc) from a systems and a professional perspective. It will also consider how the areas of pharmacy IT link together and can be used to enable and develop pharmacy professional practice. The book will examine pharmacy IT from an international perspective, taking into account all parts of the world where IT systems are used in pharmacy practice - namely - North America, the UK, Western Europe and Australia - and will compare pharmacy IT in the different regions. This book is from the author of Principles of Electronic Prescribing (Springer, 2008)

Information technology is changing healthcare in numerous wide-ranging aspects, including significantly improving the overall quality of patient care and therefore helping to reduce limitations in people's daily lives. The Digital Pill reflects on how digital technologies can combat chronic diseases including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, respiratory and neurodegenerative diseases as well as mental disorders. Chronic diseases touch every family, generate infinite suffering and cause the lion's share of every countries' healthcare spending across the world. The authors carefully study a broad selection of contemporary companies and healthcare organizations that are shaping digital healthcare. They report pioneering cases from large and small technology, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies as well as healthcare providers of all sorts across the globe and bring forward patterns and corner stones of an affordable and patient centric digital healthcare. The Digital Pill is essential reading for anyone working in, engaged with or interested in understanding the future of healthcare.

Achieving value-based healthcare, increasing quality, reducing cost, and spreading access, has proven to be extremely challenging, in part due to research that is siloed and largely focused on singular risk factors, ineffective care coordination resulting from service fragmentation, and costly unintended consequences of reform that have emerged due to the complexity of healthcare systems. Understanding the behaviour of the overall system is becoming a major concern among healthcare managers and decision-makers intent on increasing value for their systems. This book fills a gap in the literature that is becoming more evident as reform efforts proliferate: a holistic Modeling and Simulation (M&S) approach to value-based healthcare within a framework that enables designing, testing and implementing concepts to integrate resource allocations, health phenomenon dynamics, individual behaviour, and population dynamics. It presents a pathways-based efficient coordination of care model involving all stakeholders including patients, providers, care deliverers, managers, and payers. It shows how M&S can help design a better service infrastructure and describes the information technologies that are necessary to implement it successfully. It also presents global and national healthcare perspectives from Europe, USA, Asia and Africa, as well as research directions needed to realize the value-based M&S healthcare vision.

In an effort to combat human error in the medical field, medical professionals continue to seek the best practices and technology applications for the diagnosis, treatment, and overall care of their patients. Improving Health Management through Clinical Decision Support Systems brings together a series of chapters focused on the technology, funding, and future plans for improved organization and decision-making through medical informatics. Featuring timely, research-based chapters on topics including, but not limited to, data management, information security, and the benefits of technology-based medicine, this publication is an essential reference source for clinicians, scientists, health economists, policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced level students, and government officials interested in health information technology.

The development of better processes to relay medical information has enhanced the healthcare field. By implementing effective collaborative strategies, this ensures proper quality and instruction for both the patient and medical practitioners. Health Literacy: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines the latest advances in providing and helping patients and medical professionals to understand basic health information and the services that are most appropriate. Including innovative studies on interactive health information, health communication, and health education, this multi-volume book is an ideal source for professionals, researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in the improvement of health literacy.

Decentralizing Health Services

A Global Perspective

Krishna Regmi, editor

Current economic, demographic, and environmental shifts are presenting major challenges to health care systems around the world. In response, decentralization--the transfer of control from central to local authorities--is emerging as a successful means of meeting these challenges and reducing inequities of care. But as with health care itself, one size does not fit all, and care systems must be responsive to global reality as well as local demand.

"Decentralizing Health Services" explores a variety of applications of decentralization to health care delivery in both the developing and developed worlds. Outfitted with principles, blueprints, and examples, this ambitious text clearly sets out the potential role of decentralized care as a major player in public health. Its models of service delivery illustrate care that is effective, inclusive, flexible, and in tune with the current era of preventive and evidence-based healthcare . Contributors point out opportunities, caveats, and controversies as they:

Clarify the relationships among decentralization, politics, and policyDifferentiate between political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization in health care systemsConsider public/private partnerships in health systemsExplain how the effects of decentralization can be evaluated.Present the newest data on the health outcomes of decentralizationExplore some challenges and global issues of health systems in the 21st centuryAnd each chapter features learning goals, discussion questions, activities, and recommendations for further reading

Heralding changes poised to revolutionize care, " Decentralizing Health Services" will broaden the horizons of researchers and administrators in health services, health economics, and health policy"

"This book will be a terrific introduction to the field of clinical IT and clinical informatics" -- Kevin Johnson "Dr. Braunstein has done a wonderful job of exploring a number of key trends in technology in the context of the transformations that are occurring in our health care system" -- Bob Greenes "This insightful book is a perfect primer for technologists entering the health tech field." -- Deb Estrin "This book should be read by everyone. " -- David Kibbe This book provides care providers and other non-technical readers with a broad, practical overview of the changing US healthcare system and the contemporary health informatics systems and tools that are increasingly critical to its new financial and clinical care paradigms. US healthcare delivery is dramatically transforming and informatics is at the center of the changes. Increasingly care providers must be skilled users of informatics tools to meet federal mandates and succeed under value-based contracts that demand higher quality and increased patient satisfaction but at lower cost. Yet, most have little formal training in these systems and technologies. Providers face system selection issues with little unbiased and insightful information to guide them. Patient engagement to promote wellness, prevention and improved outcomes is a requirement of Meaningful Use Stage 2 and is increasingly supported by mobile devices, apps, sensors and other technologies. Care providers need to provide guidance and advice to their patients and know how to incorporated as they generate into their care. The one-patient-at-a-time care model is being rapidly supplemented by new team-, population- and public health-based models of care. As digital data becomes ubiquitous, medicine is changing as research based on that data reveals new methods for earlier diagnosis, improved treatment and disease management and prevention. This book is clearly written, up-to-date and uses real world examples extensively to explain the tools and technologies and illustrate their practical role and potential impact on providers, patients, researchers, and society as a whole.

This book examines the Facilities Management (FM) of hospitals and healthcare facilities, which are among the most complex, costly and challenging kind of buildings to manage. It presents and evaluates the FM service quality standards in Singapore's hospitals from the patient's perspective, and provides recommendations on how to successfully improve FM service quality and achieve higher patient satisfaction. The book also features valuable supplementary materials, including a checklist of 32 key factors for successful facilities management and another checklist of 24 service attributes for hospitals to achieve desirable service quality in connection with facilities management. The book adopts a unique approach of combining service quality and quality theory to provide a more holistic view of how FM service quality can be achieved in hospitals. It also integrates three instruments, namely the SERVQUAL model, the Kano model and the QFD model to yield empirical results from surveys for implementation in hospitals. Although the book was written from the perspective of FM service quality for hospitals, the findings and recommendations are also relevant for other non-healthcare sectors where appropriate lessons may also be drawn for FM and service quality in general. It will particularly benefit Quality Managers, Facilities Managers and Hospital Administrators.

Despite blockchain being an emerging technology that is mainly applied in the financial and logistics domain areas, it has great potential to be applied in other industries to generate a wider impact. Due to the need for social distancing globally, blockchain has great opportunities to be adopted in digital health including health insurance, pharmaceutical supply chain, remote diagnosis, and more. Revolutionizing Digital Healthcare Through Blockchain Technology Applications explores the current applications and future opportunities of blockchain technology in digital health and provides a reference for the development of blockchain in digital health for the future. Covering key topics such as privacy, blockchain economy, and cryptocurrency, this reference work is ideal for computer scientists, healthcare professionals, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Public Health Behind Bars From Prisons to Communities examines the burden of illness in the growing prison population, and analyzes the impact on public health as prisoners are released. This book makes a timely case for correctional health care that is humane for those incarcerated and beneficial to the communities they reenter.

"This book is essential reading for researchers of tobacco policy change. Too many studies simply complain that change is too slow because tobacco companies are too powerful and politicians lack the will to challenge them. This book goes much further, to help us understand not just industry strategy but the policy processes in which policy advocates engage, learn from each other, and help create essential global tobacco policy change." Paul Cairney, University of Stirling, UK "This book is rare in making genuinely significant contributions across both public health and policy studies. By focusing on the battle for standardised packs, it engagingly addresses one of the most prominent recent innovations in health policy that has relevance both beyond Europe and across multiple spheres of health policy. In doing so, it also offers an innovative analysis of the role of transnational corporations in policy transfer."Jeff Collin, University of Edinburgh, UK This book analyses the battle for standardised cigarette packaging ('plain packaging') in Europe, drawing on the concepts of multi-level governance and policy transfer. It analyses the strategies of policy makers, non-governmental organisations and transnational tobacco companies in attempting either to advance or to block the introduction of standardised packaging. Taking a global and multi-level approach, it analyses these struggles within European Union institutions, EU member states, and across jurisdictions, as NGOs and tobacco companies worked transnationally to counter each other. As well as presenting original empirical research detailing these policy battles, the book provides new theoretical insights into policy transfer processes, particularly within multi-level polities, showing how transnational corporations can have dramatic effects on these processes. The book will appeal equally to public health researchers, policy analysts and political scientists.

This highly practical resource brings new dimensions to the utility of qualitative data in health research by focusing on naturally occurring data. It examines how naturally occurring data complement interviews and other sources of researcher-generated health data, and takes readers through the steps of identifying, collecting, analyzing, and disseminating these findings in ethical research with real-world relevance. The authors acknowledge the critical importance of evidence-based practice in today's healthcare landscape and argue for naturally occurring data as a form of practice-based evidence making valued contributions to the field. And chapters evaluate frequently overlooked avenues for naturally occurring data, including media and social media sources, health policy and forensic health contexts, and digital communications. Included in the coverage:* Exploring the benefits and limitations of using naturally occurring data in health research * Considering qualitative approaches that may benefit from using naturally occurring data * Utilizing computer-mediated communications and social media in health * Using naturally occurring data to research vulnerable groups * Reviewing empirical examples of health research using naturally occurring data Using Naturally Occurring Data in Qualitative Health Research makes concepts, methods, and rationales accessible and applicable for readers in the health and mental health fields, among them health administrators, professionals in research methodology, psychology researchers, and practicing and trainee clinicians.

After graduating from Tripoli, Libya in 1990, Dr Benamer came to the United Kingdom in 1991 to further his training in medicine. He obtained the MRCP in 1994 and trained in neurology in Glasgow. He obtained a PhD and CCST in 2000 and was appointed a consultant neurologist in Wolverhampton and Birmingham the same year. He has been the lead neurologist in New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton since 2006. Dr Benamer is a general neurologist with special interest in movement disorders.

Dr Benamer is honorary clinical senior lecturer in Birmingham University and has an interest in medical education, in which he obtained a postgraduate certificate from Keele University in 2007. He has published more than 35 papers and two books. He is currently a senior editor of the Libyan Journal of Medicine. He was also an examiner of the MRCP Diploma from 2005 to 2009.

Dr Benamer's publications relevant to the subject of the book:

1. Benamer HT. 2007. Neurological disorders in Libya: an overview. "Neuroepidemiology" 29:143-9

2. Benamer HT. 2008. The ancestry of LRRK2 Gly2019Ser parkinsonism. "Lancet neurology" 7:769-70; author reply 70-1

3. Benamer HT, de Silva R, Siddiqui KA, Grosset DG. 2008. Parkinson's disease in Arabs: a systematic review. "Movement disorders: official journal of the Movement Disorder Society" 23:1205-10

4. Benamer HT, Ahmed ES, Al-Din AS, Grosset DG. 2009. Frequency and clinical patterns of multiple sclerosis in Arab countries: a systematic review. "Journal of the neurological sciences" 278:1-4

5. Benamer HT, Grosset D. 2009. Stroke in Arab countries: a systematic literature review. "Journal of the neurological sciences" 284:18-23

6. Benamer HT, Grosset DG. 2009. A systematic review of the epidemiology of epilepsy in Arab countries. "Epilepsia" 50:2301-4

7. Benamer HT, Shakir RA. 2009. The neurology map of the Arab world. "Journal of the neurological sciences" 285:10-2

8. Benamer HT. 2010. Neurology expertise and postgraduate training programmes in the Arab world: a survey. "European neurology" 64:313-8

9. Benamer HT, de Silva R. 2010. LRRK2 G2019S in the North African population: a review. "European neurology" 63:321-5

10. Benamer HT, Deleu D, Grosset D. 2010. Epidemiology of headache in Arab countries. "The journal of headache and pain" 11:1-3

11. Benamer HT. 2011. More epidemiological studies of neurological disorders are needed in the Arab countries. "Neuroepidemiology" 36:70.