Health Care Systems

What Distinguishes Preventive Medicine from Preventive Health Care in Health Care Systems?

Letter to Editor

Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Health Care Systems

Pervasive Systems in Health Care

An important characteristic of “Ambient Intelligence” (AmI) environments is the merging of physical and digital space (i.e. tangible objects and physical environments are acquiring a digital representation). As the computer disappears in the environments surrounding our activities, the objects therein are transformed to artifacts, that is, they are augmented with Information and Communication T...

Agent-Based Health Care Systems

In this paper we introduce the main issues related to the deployment of agent-based systems in health care. First, we comment on the characteristics of health care problems and we argue that multi-agent systems are a good choice to tackle problems with these features. This belief is supported with a number of exemplar applications of agent-based systems in medical domains. We also discuss sever...