There are many definitions of eHealth and no consensus around the underlying idea. Most contributions on eHealth focus on informatic, public health, legal, social and anthropological implications. This book investigates eHealth through community-based private practices such as pharmacies, hearing centres, opticians, and private medical centres from a management perspective. It first presents a systematic review of the theoretical research models that have been developed on eHealth. It then identifies the many innovative managerial implications of eHealth, and finally, it analyses reasons why some eHealth tools are or are not adopted.

Every year, one out of every ten people will need to have a surgical procedure. The majority of those needing surgery know nothing about the operating room or surgery. In Secrets from the Operating Room, author Curtis M. Chaudoin provides objective information and strategies to help improve the state and outcome of patient care before, during, and after surgery.

With more than thirty-seven years of experience as an operating room surgical salesman, Chaudoin gained an insider's understanding of the often secretive world of surgery. In Secrets from the Operating Room, he narrates what it's like to work as a surgical salesman and provides an overview of the state of health care. He also discusses surgical corporations and their risks and profits, and he presents an overview of hospitals and how things have changed over the years. He details the roles of the surgeons and support staff, shows how to conduct the proper research before having surgery, and offers an understanding of what happens inside the surgery suite.

Secrets from the Operating Room gives you a glimpse into the business of surgery and answers important questions about what you should know if you need an operation to increase your chances of a successful outcome.

Technological developments and improved treatment methods have acted as an impetus for recent growth and change within the medical community. As patient expectations increase and healthcare organizations have come under scrutiny for questionable practices, medical personnel must take a critical look at the current state of their operations and work to improve their managerial and treatment processes. Organizational Culture and Ethics in Modern Medicine examines the current state of the healthcare industry and promotes methods that achieve effective organizational practice for the improvement of medical services in the public and private sphere. Focusing on patient communication, technology integration, healthcare personnel management, and the delivery of quality care, this book is a pivotal reference source for medical professionals, healthcare managers, hospital administrators, public health workers, and researchers interested in improving patient and employee satisfaction within healthcare institutions.

Due to massive technological and medical advances in the life sciences (molecular genetics, biology, biochemistry, etc.), modern medicine is increasingly effective in treating individual patients, but little technological advancement has focused on advancing the healthcare infrastructure. Management Engineering for Effective Healthcare Delivery: Principles and Applications illustrates the power of management engineering for quantitative managerial decision-making in healthcare settings. This understanding makes it possible, in turn, to predict performance and/or real resource requirements, allowing decision-makers to be truly proactive rather than reactive. The distinct feature of this book is that it provides international exposure to this challenging area.

This provocative appraisal unpacks commonly held beliefs about healthcare management and replaces them with practical strategies and realistic policy goals. Using Henry Mintzberg's "Myths of Healthcare" as a springboard, it reveals management practices that undermine care delivery, explores their cultural and corporate origins, and details how they may be reversed through changes in management strategy, organization, scale, and style. Tackling conventional wisdom about decision-making, cost-effectiveness, service quality, and equity, contributors fine-tune concepts of mission and vision by promoting collaboration, engagement, and common sense. The book's multidisciplinary panel of experts analyzes the most popular healthcare management "myths," among them: * The healthcare system is failing. * The healthcare system can be fixed through social engineering. * Healthcare institutions can be fixed by bringing in the heroic leader. * The healthcare system can be fixed by treating it more as a business. * Healthcare is rightly left to the private sector, for the sake of efficiency. The Myths of Health Care speaks to a large, diverse audience: scholars of all levels interested in the research in health policy and management, graduate and under-graduate students attending courses in leadership and management of public sector organization, and practitioners in the field of health care.

"This timely book provides insight into the changing role of the 'hospital' in the face of technological, organizational innovation and ever-tightening health budgets."James Barlow, Imperial College Business School, UK "This book covers various relevant aspects of the hospital in different states and contexts. Underlining the importance of business models for future hospitals, this publication presents models of care from a historic and a current perspective. All authors possess a deep insight into different health care systems, not only as scholars but as experts working for world-renowned health policy institutions such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank or the European Observatory for Health Systems."Siegfried Walch, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria "For an organisation like mine, representing those involved in the strategic planning of healthcare infrastructure, this book provides invaluable insights into what really matters - now and for the future - in the complex and contentious field of hospital development."Jonathan Erskine, European Health Property Network, Netherlands This book seeks to reframe current policy discussions on hospitals. Healthcare services turn expensive economic resources-people, capital, pharmaceuticals, energy, materials-into care and cure. Hospitals concentrate the use and the cost of these resources, particularly highly-trained people, expensive capital, and embedded technologies. But other areas of health, such as public health and primary care, seem to attract more attention and affection, at least within the health policy community. How to make sense of this paradox? Hospitals choose, or are assigned, to deliver certain parts of care packages. They are organised to do this via "business models". These necessarily incorporate models of care - the processes of dealing with patients. The activity needs to be governed, in the widest senses. Rational decisions need to be taken about both the care and the resources to be used. This book pulls these elements together, to stimulate a debate.

This timely study analyzes social, economic, political, provider, and patient factors shaping collective patient involvement in European health care from the postwar period to the present day. Examining representative countries England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, it documents the roles of providers and legislatures in facilitating consumer involvement, and the varied forms of patient input into hospital operations. These findings are compared and contrasted against the intent and ideals behind patient involvement to assess the effectiveness of implementation policy, strengths and drawbacks of patient participation, and patient satisfaction and outcomes. The book's conclusions identify emerging forms of patient participation and predict the impact of health policy on the future of European collective patient involvement. Included in the coverage: * Patient involvement: who, what for, and in what way? * The Netherlands: the legislative process to collective patient involvement * England: formal means of public involvement-a continuous story of discontinuity * Germany: Joint Federal Committee-the "Little Legislator" * Sweden: reasons for a late emergence of patient involvement * Lessons to be learned from implementing patient involvement The Evolution and Everyday Practice of Collective Patient Involvement in Europe will interest and inspire scholars and researchers in diverse fields, including social policy, sociology, political sciences, and nursing studies, as well as patient organizations, policymakers, and healthcare providers.

This unifying volume offers a clear theoretical framework for the research shaping the emerging direction of informatics in health care. Contributors ground the reader in the basics of informatics methodology and design, including creating salient research questions, and explore the human dimensions of informatics in studies detailing how patients perceive, respond to, and use health data. Real-world examples bridge the theoretical and the practical as knowledge management-based solutions are applied to pervasive issues in information technologies and service delivery. Together, these articles illustrate the scope of health possibilities for informatics, from patient care management to hospital administration, from improving patient satisfaction to expanding the parameters of practice. Highlights of the coverage:* Design science research opportunities in health care * IS/IT governance in health care: an integrative model * Persuasive technologies and behavior modification through technology: design of a mobile application for behavior change * The development of a hospital secure messaging and communication platform: a conceptualization * The development of intelligent patient-centric systems for health care * An investigation on integrating Eastern and Western medicine with informatics Interest in Theories to Inform Superior Health Informatics Research and Practice cuts across academia and the healthcare industry. Its audience includes healthcare professionals, physicians and other clinicians, practicing informaticians, hospital administrators, IT departments, managers, and management consultants, as well as scholars, researchers, and students in health informatics and public health.

Shock Therapy For the American Health Care System describes the problems of the health care system and offers a program of comprehensive reform that is more far-reaching than anything currently being proposed. From a veteran physician comes this remarkably clear-eyed look at what's wrong with how we adminster and pay for health care and what can be done to fix it. In Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System: Why Comprehensive Reform Is Needed, Dr. Robert Levine offers an easily understandable diagnosis of the problems plaguing our current health care infrastructure, with discussions that include the roles of various stakeholders—insurance companies, "big pharma," hospitals, health care providers, and patients. He also dispels a number of myths designed to make voters leery of any reform efforts. Levine's comprehensive plan addresses everything from bloated bureaucracies to unnecessary procedures to the handling of negligence and malpractice lawsuits/claims. Throughout, Levine backs his proposals with facts and comparisons to systems in various countries, and concludes that even now, with disaster looming, the ultimate goal of providing health insurance for every American is achievable and affordable.

In view of the rising importance and prevalence of network-based collaboration, this book aims to meet the need for more theory in this area. Theoretically conceptualizing and empirically describing the practice of reflexive leadership in inter-organisational networks, it explores how member organisations approach reflexive leadership and the associated challenges. Examining these questions from wider leadership theory perspectives as well as a tighter focus upon inter-organizational networks, the author specifically explores how reflexive leadership can be sustained and how social and political contexts may obstruct or support its use, acceptance and practice. Based on in-depth qualitative empirical fieldwork in the Swiss healthcare sector, the book offers a novel practice-theoretical model for use in inter-organizational networks.

Providing a global perspective on the increasingly important concept of talent management in the health sector, this significant new text brings together evidence and research findings to suggest how healthcare organisations can attract and retain talent. The demand for healthcare in many countries often exceeds the supply of those who can provide it, and with case studies from Asia, the UK and the US, this book provides geographical insights into the extent of this global challenge. Topics discussed include employee engagement, employer branding, retention and succession planning. Talent Management in Healthcare offers readers a substantial guide and provides a sustainable talent strategy for organisations within the healthcare industry. An invaluable contribution to research on human resource development, this book will be of interest to academics and practitioners involved in organisational development, human resource management and healthcare management.

This book presents the research that resulted from a fruitful collaboration between many CNRS research laboratories, health establishments and industrialists. This research contributes to the study and the development of logistical systems, in particular health-oriented logistical systems, in order to manage and optimize physical, informational and financial flows. The authors examine optimization and modeling methods to facilitate decision support for the management of logistics systems in the health field, including solutions to problems encountered in the management of logistics flows and the study of systems incorporating these flows. In the first chapter, logistics engineering is presented whilst the second chapter introduces the study of real cases of transport, management crisis and warehouse management logistics systems. The third chapter is devoted to the study of hospital systems and emergency services and in the fourth chapter, the authors highlight the operational aspect of the hospital system thanks to an innovative modeling approach. Finally, mathematical and algorithmic models of scheduling, and dynamic orchestration of the collaborative workflow by a multi-agent system, are introduced.

This book is a thorough, balanced, and insightful study of the present status and future direction of health care economics and its far-reaching ramifications. Health Economics provides exhaustive analyses of such major issues as cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, quality enhancement, and technology assessment.

Part One presents a basic overview of cost analysis, production functions, and provider cost behavior. Part Two considers economic models of physicians and hospital behavior, and recent changes in methods for paying physicians. Part Three focuses on employee cost sharing, HMOs, gatekeepers to contain utilization, and the use of case managers in long-term care. Part four looks at equity, social welfare, and the unique problems of urban medical centers. Part Five focuses on consumer information, quality measurement, and health manpower policies for nonphysician providers. Cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis is reviewed in Part Six. The last part summarizes major future policy options and suggests a number of mixed strategies, including capitation. In short, "Health EconomicS" provides policy makers, health care providers, and students with the analytical tools needed to effectively balance efficiency and quality.

Telemedicine has the potential to significantly alter structures, procedures, and eventually outcomes in healthcare structures worldwide. Today the field of telemedicine is still dominated by very committed efforts of research and development. However, there is a growing number of concepts and applications which have been implemented in clinical routine or are ready to be implemented. Health care providers, patients, third party payers, and not at least policy makers should be informed about these rapidly emerging applications, which could have a considerable impact on the delivery of health care. This book offers a comprehensive source of information not only for experts but also for the target groups mentioned above. It provides background information on legal aspects, issues concerning further development, and evaluation of telemedicine applications. The work also presents numerous projects covering the clinical fields of emergency medicine, surgery, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, dermatology, radiology, pathology, psychiatry and other clinical specialties. Recognizing the Internet as a major source of information on issues related to telemedicine and information technology in general, a 'Webliography' provides links to a selection of the most relevant Web sites on the Internet.

This volume addresses hospital effluents in terms of their composition and the management and treatment strategies currently (being) adopted around the globe. In this context, one major focus is on pharmaceutical compounds: their observed concentration range, ecotoxicological effects, and the removal efficiency achieved by the different technologies. Another focus is on management strategies (dedicated hospital wastewater treatment, or a combined approach also involving urban wastewater) and currently adopted treatments to reduce the released pollutant load. Innovative and promising technologies under investigation at the lab and pilot scale are presented. A discussion of remaining knowledge gaps and future research requirements rounds out the coverage. The respective chapters, written by experts in the different fields, provide useful information for a broad audience: scientists involved in the management and treatment of hospital effluents and wastewater containing micropollutants, administrators and decision-makers, legislators involved in the authorization and management of healthcare structure effluents, and environmental engineers involved in the design of wastewater treatment plants, as well as newcomers and students interested in these issues.