While improvement methods have delivered higher efficiency and better quality products, the question of applicability in healthcare is still clouded by uncertainty. Traditionally, there have been opposing views: on the one hand promoting large-scale industrial-type improvement to bring healthcare into the modern era and, on the other, arguing that people are not motor cars and that simplistic a...

Healthcare management operates in an environment of aggressive pricing, tough competition, and rapidly changing guidelines. Computer simulation models are increasingly used by large healthcare institutions to meet these challenges. However, small healthcare facilities serving the poor are equally in need of meeting these challenges but lack the finances and personnel required to develop and imp...

Home healthcare is part of the most critical research and development healthcare areas. The objective is to decentralize healthcare, leading to a shift from in-hospital care to more advanced home healthcare, while improving efficiency, individualisation, equity and quality of healthcare delivery and limiting financial resources. In this paper, we adopt a process approach to tackle the home heal...

Athletes and their support staff, International Olympic Committee (IOC) family, technical staff, contractors, volunteers, sponsors, media and spectators all are essential participants in the biggest festival of sport in the world. They all need healthcare, but the priority for the IOC and any organising committee of an Olympic Games (OCOG) is protecting the health of athletes. The demands of at...

Precision medicine refers to the idea of delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time, usually with a focus on a data-centered approach to this task. In this perspective piece, we use the term "precision healthcare" to describe the development of precision approaches that bridge from the individual to the population, taking advantage of individual-level data, but also t...

The operational management of healthcare services is expected to directly touch patient experiences. Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MoHME) for the first time, as such, has sought to improve the operational management of healthcare delivery within a reform agenda by setting benchmarks for ‘number of visit per hour’ and waiting time in outpatient clinics of about 700 affiliated...

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high-quality services to their patients at affordable costs. To tackle this challenge, the Medical Informatics community targets at formalisms for developing decision-support systems (DSSs) based on clinical guidelines. At the same time, business process management (BPM) enables IT support for healthcare processes, e.g., based on w...

ver the past 10 years, total annual healthcare spending in Canada has increased by more than $10 billion. It reached $172 billion in 2008, or $5,170 per person, outpacing inflation and population growth annually. Even when adjusted for inflation, this escalation in public expenditures cannot fail to attract the attention of taxpayers and consumers alike (Canadian Institute for Health Informatio...

This is a qualitative survey with a hermeneutic-dialectic frame of reference, designed to identify how parents and caregivers see the attribute 'coordination' in children's healthcare, in terms of resolving problems in children's health. The interview was held with 16 people responsible for care of children under one year of age, served in Emergency Care Units of a municipality in the south of ...

Increasing demand and costs for healthcare, exacerbated by ageing populations and a great shortage of doctors, are serious concerns worldwide. Consequently, this has generated a great amount of motivation in providing better healthcare through smarter healthcare systems. Management and processing of healthcare data are challenging due to various factors that are inherent in the data itself such...