This book examines in detail the clinical implications of those diseases that either are primarily triggered by air pollution or represent direct consequences of air pollutants. The aim is to provide medical practitioners with practical solutions to issues in diagnosis and treatment while simultaneously furnishing other interested parties with crucial information on the field. The book introduces the concept that air pollution-related diseases constitute a new class of pathologies. A wide range of conditions mainly attributable to air pollution are discussed, covering different body systems and pollution impacts in subsets of the population. In addition to presenting state of the art overviews of clinical aspects, the book carefully examines the implications of current knowledge for social and public health strategies aimed at disease prevention and prophylaxis. The Clinical Handbook of Air Pollution-Related Diseases will greatly assist doctors and healthcare workers when dealing with the consequences of air pollution in their everyday practice and will provide researchers, industry, and policymakers with valuable facts and insights.

The debate over eHealth is alive as never before. Supporters suggest that it will result in dramatic innovations in healthcare, including a giant leap towards patient-centered care, new opportunities to improve effectiveness, and enhanced wellness and quality of life. In addition, the growing market value of investments in health IT suggests that eHealth can offer at least a partial cure for the current economic stagnation. Detractors counter these arguments by claiming that eHealth has already failed: the UK Department of Health has shut down the NHS National Program for IT, Google has discontinued its Health flagship, and doubts have arisen over privacy safeguards for both patients and medical professionals. This book briefly explains why caregivers, professionals, technicians, patients, politicians, and others should all consider themselves stakeholders in eHealth. It offers myth-busting responses to some ill-considered arguments from both sides of the trench, in the process allowing a fresh look at eHealth. In addition, it describes how the technical failures of previous eHealth systems can be avoided, examines the legal basis of eHealth, and discusses associated ethical issues.

This book explains how telemedicine can offer solutions capable of improving the care and survival rates of cancer patients and can also help patients to live a normal life in spite of their condition. Different fields of application - community, hospital and home based - are examined, and detailed attention is paid to the use of tele-oncology in rural/extreme rural settings and in developing countries. The impact of new technologies and the opportunities afforded by the social web are both discussed. The concluding chapters consider eLearning in relation to cancer care and assess the scope for education to improve prevention. No medical condition can shatter people's lives as cancer does today and the need to develop strategies to reduce the disease burden and improve quality of life is paramount. Readers will find this new volume in Springer's TELe Health series to be a rich source of information on the important contribution that can be made by telemedicine in achieving these goals.

This book aims to present some fundamental pillars that must be taken into account for the design and construction of a medical record system. The work does not claim to be exhaustive, as the spirit of the book is to propose to reason out on some issues that have to be considered as the main features to take in consideration in the design and deployment of medical record systems, trying to bring positive issues to the general discussion. The first challenge has been to face the issues proposed in a co-productive way, in which the point of views of different actors (technicians, doctors, policy makers) are harmonised in shared visions, where the requirements that must be posed and considered become opportunities and challenges to overcome, also offering different shared solutions based on technology, organisational changes, medical actions and workflow in a unitary way.

This book assesses the main features of COVID-19 from a clinical point of view, based on observations made during the disease epidemic in Northern Italy, one of the most affected areas in the world (the region has been the epicenter of the global pandemic for more than a month), and the first region outside China facing overwhelming numbers of cases. With no practical guidelines in place, Italian doctors were called to fight against an unknown disease. For the first time in modern history, healthcare workers and decision-makers had to find rapid solutions to a life-changing health crisis with no evidence-based recommendations or procedures in place to guide their actions. Sharing the lessons learned from this experience, and offering practical tips on implementing future programs for pandemic preparedness, the book is a valuable tool for medical practitioners and health-policy-makers wanting to better understand the complexity of the current and future global health crises.

The debate over eHealth is alive as never before. Supporters suggest that it will result in dramatic innovations in healthcare, including a giant leap towards patient-centered care, new opportunities to improve effectiveness, and enhanced wellness and quality of life. In addition, the growing market value of investments in health IT suggests that eHealth can offer at least a partial cure for the current economic stagnation.  Detractors counter these arguments by claiming that eHealth has already failed: the UK Department of Health has shut down the NHS National Program for IT, Google has discontinued its Health flagship, and doubts have arisen over privacy safeguards for both patients and medical professionals. This book briefly explains why caregivers, professionals, technicians, patients, politicians, and others should all consider themselves stakeholders in eHealth. It offers myth-busting responses to some ill-considered arguments from both sides of the trench, in the process allowing a fresh look at eHealth. In addition, it describes how the technical failures of previous eHealth systems can be avoided, examines the legal basis of eHealth, and discusses associated ethical issues.​  

This book describes in detail the potential role of ICT and electronic systems, together with the application of Web 2.0 technologies, in telepediatrics and child health. Rather than simply proposing engineering solutions that may soon become outdated, it is designed to address those real needs that telemedicine and developers are asked to meet. The orientation of the book is very much toward primary care and both low and high-income settings as well as extreme or complex scenarios are considered. The first two sections of the book describe different fields of application, such as the community, the hospital and children with chronic illnesses or special needs, and examine technical issues. The use of telemedicine in delivery of care in extreme rural settings and developing countries is then discussed, with attention also to major emergencies and humanitarian crises. The closing chapters consider the role of modern technologies in the education of caregivers who work with children.

Child health is a crucial issue in both industrialized and developing countries. "Telemedicine for Children s Health" will be an excellent guide to the potential value of telemedicine devices in reducing the burden for children and parents and in offering quick and concrete solutions in low-resource scenarios."