healthcare Articles
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Indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants and challenges in developing ethnoharmacology in Africa: example of Oku, Cameroon
Most traditional African cultures believe that, to maintain the health and vitality of human beings, they have to address forces in both the natural and the spiritual world. This paper uses a participatory approach to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the traditional health system. It presents some concepts and practices, some characteristics of indigenous knowledge ...
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Applying systems thinking to assess sustainability in healthcare system of systems
Healthcare systems face increasing demands and reduced resources. Therefore, there is growing attention paid to sustainability in healthcare. Healthcare is a complex system of systems. This paper discusses healthcare system challenges and the need to consider a sustainable approach in addressing these challenges. An equitable and balanced approach is required to deal with the demands related to ...
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Achieving successful EPR implementation with the penta-stage model
Electronic patient record (EPR) systems are currently being implemented in a plethora of healthcare organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. These systems, through their ability to integrate several functions and provide seamless access to information, are expected to enable value-driven patient-centric healthcare delivery. At a time when healthcare globally is under tremendous pressure, EPR ...
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Latent variables in conjoint measurement – a case of healthcare market in Poland
The paper focuses on the application of additive measurement models with latent variables into the analysis of customer preferences' structure. The patient choices refer, in this case, to ambulatory healthcare market. The background of the analysis is the changing attitude towards patients as clients in healthcare sector in Poland. The study is based on the empirical evidence gathered in the poll ...
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Managing healthcare technology in quality management framework
Healthcare services available these days deploy high technology to satisfy both internal and external customers by continuously improving various quality parameters. Quality improvement in healthcare services is a complex and multidimensional task. Although various quality management tools are routinely deployed for identifying quality issues in healthcare delivery, there is absence of an ...
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Identifying sources of resistance to change in healthcare
The continuous introduction of new healthcare technologies, as well as the proliferation of new processes that guarantee better treatment and care of patients, suggests that the pace of the healthcare environment has been accelerating in recent years. Therefore, it is very important to identify and address sources of resistance to change before, during, and after change efforts are made in ...
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Using ontology-based knowledge networks for user training in managing healthcare processes
The cooperative and collaborative nature of healthcare delivery requires active user participation in healthcare process design/redesign. Hence, there is a need to provide users with reusable, flexible, agile and adaptable training material in order to enable them instil their knowledge and expertise in healthcare process modelling and automation activities. This paper presents a prototype ...
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Using an informing strategy to manage moral legitimacy in healthcare organisations
Healthcare organisations operating within highly institutionalised environments are exposed to very intense isomorphic pressures. These institutional pressures help determine organisational success and survival through the recognition and distribution of legitimacy, which is generally gained through conformity. Moral legitimacy, defined as the ethical judgments made about an organisation's ...
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Challenges to improving access to essential drugs: perspectives from across the divide
This paper examines the principal challenges to improving the accessibility to healthcare and medicines in developing countries. The analysis draws on current literature to provide an overview of the factors that have led to the disparity in healthcare access; the problems of developing nations in overcoming such impediments and the challenges faced by the providers of medicines, namely that of ...
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Achieving knowledge management integration through EAI: a case study from healthcare sector
Healthcare Information Systems (IS) non-integrated nature is associated with inefficient data and knowledge exchange and reduction in healthcare care services' quality. Therefore, numerous medical errors occur that impact healthcare services. Healthcare organisations have used Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to integrate IS. Literature indicates that EAI achieves integration at four ...
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A public health policy approach to reducing economic and health costs of obesity in the USA
Obesity is rapidly increasing in the USA. It is one of the most serious public health problems that significantly increase the risk of many chronic illnesses. Obesity disproportionately affects people with lower incomes and minority groups and imposes a heavy financial burden on the healthcare system in the USA. Thus, there is a critical need for healthcare policies that are designed to stem the ...
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A relational model of medical knowledge sharing and medical decision-making quality
Knowledge sharing has been recognised as a key approach in sustaining a competitive advantage. In knowledge-intensive firms like healthcare organisations, expertise is based upon well-developed and reshapeable knowledge networks. Hence, it is believed that in healthcare organisations, knowledge sharing among physicians improves medical decision-making quality. We propose a relational model ...
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Healthcare system as a value network
Healthcare systems consist of many different kinds of actors with varying interests and purposes. This forms a complex set of relationships, which can be seen as a network. The interesting question is how to balance in the network the needs of the patient as the customer and the purposes of the provider to operate effectively. We argue that a value network analysis is a key for this question, as ...
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Negative competition steering patient flow in a public–private healthcare co–opetition setting – a Finnish case
Healthcare services are produced jointly by public and private service providers. Simultaneously they are each others' competitors, thus operating in a co–opetition setting. Co–operation enables producing healthcare services efficiently. However, the public service providers have to operate on budget funds providing services to everyone, while private service providers skim the shared patient ...
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Challenges of performance measurement and management in public healthcare services
This paper aims to identify the specific problems that healthcare organisations face when designing performance measurement and management. The research has been carried out using the qualitative research approach. The findings of the study are based on ten interviews with 22 key persons working in different positions in the basic social and healthcare sector in the Päijät–Häme region in Finland. ...
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Health, inequality and commercialisation
This paper offers a critique of the increasing commercialisation of healthcare. It argues for a gift economy in which patients are respected for their knowledge and capacity to help control their own health outcomes as co-producers rather than consumers whose market wants need to be stimulated. It notes the perverse consequences for both patients and medical staff of treating healthcare as a ...
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Management for the health domain: state of the art and challenges for the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union (2007-2013)
Information Systems in the context of the health domain play a critical role. The evolution of the semantic web and knowledge management technologies in the last years set a new context for the exploitation of patient-centric strategies based on well-defined semantics and knowledge. In this paper we have two critical objectives. On the one hand to exploit the state of the art on Semantic Web and ...
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Implementing lean in surgery - lessons and implications
The principles of lean production originating from the Toyota production system has spread from manufacturing to healthcare. Needless to say, this raises concern whether such principles are actually applicable where the product are humans in need of medical care and what are the consequences for the medical staff. The literature on lean does not suggest that lean should not be applicable in ...
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Longitudinal knowledge strategising in a long-term healthcare organisation
Long-term healthcare organisations significantly benefit from Knowledge Management (KM). However, the extant literature has little empirical support for this statement. Using the KM instrument developed by Bontis and Fitz-enz (2002), this paper extends prior studies by evaluating behaviours within a not-for-profit context over several years. As such, it tests a comprehensive causal model that ...
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BOHS issues information paper on the role of Occupational Hygiene in protecting healthcare workers
The British Occupational Hygiene Society has issued an information paper on the role of Occupational Hygiene in protecting healthcare workers. Directed at health bodies, the paper explains the concept of Occupational Hygiene – the science of protecting people from occupational exposures and its potential role in protecting people working in healthcare settings. You can read the paper ...
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