The changing and demanding nature of the mining workforce in rural and remote Australia brings unique challenges to the delivery of healthcare services. In an attempt to control costs whilst delivering cost effective and quality healthcare, new models of delivery must be considered. For a workforce that is fly-in/fly-out, the provision of healthcare is problematic given the lack of consistency ...

Developing regions account for a significant fraction of the world’s health problems and are in a dire need for an improved healthcare delivery system. Achieving this goal is a very challenging task given the limited financial constraints and the scale of the problem. In this paper, we argue that computer science systems research will have a significant role towards addressing some of the press...

A foundational element of modern healthcare is an evidence-based practice. However, the conduct of research to generate evidence and the subsequent application of research findings are viewed by many Canadian healthcare organizations as separate from healthcare delivery. This mindset impedes effective translation of knowledge into practice. In this article, underlying issues that enable this di...

Efforts to ensure effective participation of patients in healthcare are called by many names-patient centredness, patient engagement, patient experience. Improvement initiatives in this domain often resemble the efforts of manufacturers to engage consumers in designing and marketing products. Services, however, are fundamentally different than products; unlike goods, services are always 'coprod...

A fundamental requirement for the healthcare industry is that the delivery of care comes first and nothing should interfere with it. As a consequence, the access control mechanisms used in healthcare to regulate and restrict the disclosure of data are often bypassed in case of emergencies. This phenomenon, called “break the glass”, is a common pattern in healthcare organizations and, though qui...

The introduction of healthcare information systems (HIS) technologies into the healthcare environment has led to increased efficiency in providing better services and improved processes for healthcare practitioners. Hence, the information technology (IT) department has a significant role in providing technical support and maintenance to the HIS in order to ensure efficiency of the HIS use among...

Medical science has made revolutionary changes in the past decades. Contemporaneously however, healthcare has made incremental changes at best. The growing discrepancy between the revolutionary changes in medicine and the minimal changes in healthcare processes is leading to inefficient and ineffective healthcare deliver and one if not the significant contributor to the exponentially increasing...

The healthcare industry is unique when compared to other industries in that multiple stakeholders manage healthcare services. Consumers are the ultimate users of these services; however, they have relatively little influence on their own health service choices. The industry is changing rapidly with new technologies making access to healthcare information via the Internet and other sources easie...

INTRODUCTION The USA lags behind other high-income countries in many health indicators. Outcome differences are associated with differences in the relative spending between healthcare and social services at the national level. The impact of the ratio and delivery of social and healthcare services on the individual patient's health is however unknown. 'Reframing Healthcare Services through the L...