Foreword

The adaptation continues

For healthcare providers it is important to remember that globalisation is here to stay.

Globalised Healthcare

What lies ahead

With the increasing complexity of globalisation, escalating cost of healthcare and rapid advances in technology—both equipment and IT—the challenges and choices facing the practicing physician, managers and leaders are daunting. The effects of these changes on patient care may be even more difficult to discern.

Healthcare Management

Global Health Tourism with Qualified Rehabilitation

The international health tourism has increased in the last few years. Rehabilitation can play a significant role in improving healthcare tourism prospects. German experience in providing rehabilitation services illustrates the huge potential this sector holds in developing health tourism.

Care Pathways

The basics

Care pathways are considered to be one of the best tools hospitals can use to manage the quality in healthcare concerning the standardisation of care processes, since they promote organised and efficient patient care based on evidence. It has been proven that their implementation reduces the variability in clinical practice and improves outcomes.

Care Pathway for Total Hip Replacement

An innovative approach

Using clinical pathways to standardise care across the continuum—from the physicians’ office to the O.R., recovery post operation—improves communication among the care-giving team. The pathways are also a tool to educate and involve patients in their care, as they identify variation from expected outcomes and goals. Pathways improve the delivery of care to patients through encouraging early ambulation for those patients who undergo total hip replacement surgery while increasing clinical and organisational efficiency and revenue.

Managing End-of-Life Services

Experience from England

For years, charities, hospices and small teams of specialist nurses and doctors held the monopoly of responsibility for end-of-life care. Recently, Primary Care (Community) services across England began to realise the importance of a coordination point for the development and management of services.

Medical Tourism

Role of telemedicine

Medical tourism has become an important alternative for patients to get timely treatment and to seek desired medical care in foreign countries. Telemedicine can play a vital role in medical tourism through an evaluation of the involved business processes.

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

Incorporating Ayurveda into mainstream medicine could be an advantage to Indian hospitals in the medical tourism market.

Interview

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

India’s traditional medicine methods are popular abroad, and Ayurveda, in particular, is a huge draw for tourists travelling to India.

Interview

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

There is a void in mainstream healthcare which is being effectively complemented by Ayurveda. To that extent, appropriately integrating the two will enable delivery of comprehensive health are services to the market.

Medical Sciences

Heart Failure Management

Monitoring with implantable devices

Implantable devices, including pacemakers, defibrillators and cardiac resynchronisation systems, may play a role in helping monitor the progress of heart failure in an individual patient.

Treatment of Stroke

Acting on the symptoms

Prompt recognition of suspected stroke symptoms and immediate activation of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are crucial to effective pre-hospital stroke care, early access to stroke specialist services and successful management.

Advanced Colorectal Cancer

Improving the survival rate

The management of Colorectal Cancer liver metastases has evolved over the past decade as a result of using more sophisticated imaging technology, effective systemic therapies including multi-drug treatment regimes with advanced surgical techniques. This has greatly improved response rates, resectability rates and in turn survival.

Surgical Speciality

Transection of the Liver

Overview of techniques

Over the past 50 years, the postoperative mortality from liver resection has fallen from 33 to 1.5 per cent. Whilst this is multifaceted, one key ingredient is our ability to transect liver parenchyma in a 'bloodless' fashion. The emerging new techniques for liver transection not only improve survival rates but also reduce mortality rates considerably.

Treatment of Gastric Cancer

Role of radiotherapy

Radical surgery is the cornerstone in the treatment of gastric cancer, but results in high locoregional recurrence rates and poor survival. Therefore, further improvement is sought in pre- and postoperative multimodality approaches. High-precision modern radiotherapy, in particular when combined with chemotherapy, plays an important role in optimising clinical outcome.

Trends in Surgery of Kidney Tumors

Shift to less invasive and nephron-sparing techniques

Indications for nephron sparing surgery are expanding. In approach to partial nephrectomy, open surgery is still the gold standard. Laparoscopic approach is applied only in carefully selected patients. This method is more challenging, with a higher percentage of complications, however, it is expanding.

Diagnostics

Echocardiography

New and evolving roles

Echocardiography plays a key role in the diagnosis of many cardiac conditions and in the assessment of response to therapies. Despite the emergence of new, advanced diagnostic tools such as cardiac computer tomography and cardiac magnetic resonance, echocardiography still plays an important role in patient care because of its unique capabilities.

Diagnostics for the Developing World

Challenges and constraints

In view of limited funding for healthcare, there is a great need and potential for simple, high quality and affordable diagnostic products in the developing world. At present, Immunochromatography-based Rapid Diagnostic Tests are able to meet their requirement to some extent. Innovative molecular diagnostic tools are seen as the future successful products.

Asian Diagnostics Market

Emerging opportunities

Advances in nanotechnology and genomics have enhanced the role of diagnostics in the healthcare market, allowing more tests to be performed at the point-of-care and facilitating the shift towards personalized medicine.

Technology, Equipment & Devices

Devices for the Failing Heart

The future is here

Mechanical circulatory support is an important adjunct to the management of patients with advanced heart failure. Technology advances in this area have improved overall survival. The challenge for clinicians is to translate the clinical evidence into selection of the most appropriate device that will provide benefit for an individual patient.

Nano-Healthcare

Biotechnology & biomedical perspective of disruptive potential

Nanotechnology has all the potential to become a disruptive and revolutionary technology in terms of its healthcare application. However, there are a few ethical concerns which need to be sorted out before its wide-spread use in healthcare.

Facilities & Operations

Patient Safety and Risk Management

A look at the basics

Even as modern healthcare continues to achieve excellent results, all too often patients are put at risk either through errors or through failure to assess their needs properly, manage their care and recognise deterioration.

Improving Reliability for Safer Care

A proactive approach

Reliability and safety are now essential components of healthcare. However, providing better care requires a proactive approach from the providers.

State of Sustainable Design in Healthcare

A commentary

A more transformative vision of ‘living’ and ‘regenerative’ hospital buildings is beginning to coalesce worldwide. Primarily, this vision finds its roots in the connection between buildings and health.

Information Technology

Understanding SOA

Caring about IT architecture

Increasingly, healthcare organisations are looking towards healthcare IT to help drive efficiencies and improve care quality. However, they need to sort out the common misconceptions regarding SOA before adopting it in their organisations.

Telehealth in Asia

Healthcare for the communities

The Internet and next generation communication technologies are revolutionising the delivery of care and are increasingly utilised to deliver better and more comprehensive care to communities that need it most. Telecare or the delivery of care virtually supported by Internet and communication tools is breaking new ground.

Leveraging Authentic Health Information

Key to patient empowerment

Advancements in medical knowledge have led to increased complexity of care delivered by multiple teams often across organisations. As the population ages, delivering such care will become increasingly difficult. Real-time digital medicine, enabling patients to view their own medical records, which contain high quality information, and enable them to make choices about the care they receive affords the opportunity to empower patients and clinicians.