Foreword

From possibilities to reality

In 2008, healthcare continued to struggle with the adaptation
of Information Technology. Will 2009 be any different?

Healthcare Management

Commissioning for Improved Patient Safety

Rise of a new era

Ensuring the delivery of healthcare as safely as possible has become top priority for the NHS. The commissioners have an important role to play in planning and monitoring services on the basis of quality and outcomes to restore primum non nocere (first, do no harm)as a policy to its rightful place in the health system. But how should commissioners set about their task?

Lean in Primary Care

Sustaining transformation

Lean approaches have been widely adopted by hospitals, but application in the primary care setting has received less attention. Primary care can use a Lean approach to structure and sustain quality improvement work but, as with all quality improvement approaches, needs energy and committed leadership.

Emergency Services in India

Counting on betterment

India requires a better emergency medical service to meet the growing number of emergencies. What exists currently in the form of fragmented services across the country falls way short of meeting the requirement.

Personalised Healthcare

A transformational opportunity

Despite increasing healthcare costs, healthcare suffers from suboptimal quality and inefficiency. Personalised Healthcare offers the ransformational
opportunity. This article discusses the science, enabling technologies,
opportunities and challenges of moving Personalised Healthcare forward.

Medical Sciences

Importance of Traditional Medicine

In the age of technology

Most nations, except the US, have natural medicine traditions known and widely practised by the populace. With the increasing availability of Western technocentred medicine, there’s a seduction in favour of ‘modern’ medicine over traditional treatments. Health outcomes in the US indicate the risks on this path and the importance of staying patient-centred.

Contrast Echocardiography

Current indications

Contrast agents have been shown to be useful to improve the image quality in echocardiography. The development of new ultrasound contrast agents and imaging techniques has enabled the bedside assessment of myocardial function and perfusion.

Surgical Speciality

Heart Valve Surgeries

Innovations and new developments

Operation through a smaller incision makes valve surgery easier on the patient. Because of improved durability, more tissue valves are implanted compared to mechanical valves. The latest development is percutaneous replacement of aortic valves and repair of mitral valves.

Diagnostics

MR Diffusion and Perfusion

Can they replace PET?

Functional Magnetic resonance imaging tools have now become widely
available and allow viewing beyond the morphology of physiologic and pathologic tissue. Using innovative sequence design and modern MR contrast media, most methods can be easily integrated into the standard
MRI protocols and make a combined assessment in one single exam possible. Although MR is still less sensitive than PET imaging, functional MRI tools end up as a comparator using to some of the assessments, e.g. perfusion imaging or diffusion MRI, even the same modelling strategies of the imaging data are used.

Cardiac Computed Tomography

Emerging cardiac devices and technologies

Recent studies have confirmed that non-invasive coronary imaging using
Computed Tomographic Coronary Angiography (CTCA) is exceptionally
accurate and at the same time, compared with its invasive counterpart, is
faster, cheaper and safer.

The Innovator’s Prescription

How Asia can disrupt the global healthcare

Asian innovators have the opportunity to design systems and services that are profitable and sustainable, yet affordable and accessible to everyone.
As they do so, they can make major contributions to solve the global healthcare crisis by collaborating with colleagues in other regions
to adapt and export those new models of care.

Technology, Equipment & Devices

Orthopedic Medical Devices

Emerging technologies and trends

Facilities & Operations Management

In and Out of the Emergency Room

Streamlined design of patient flow

Many factors influence the patient throughput in and out of the Emergency
Department. Clarity in layout and simplicity in operations are keys to streamlined flow.

A Transition in Progress

IT in healthcare

IT continues to evolve in an industry characterised by slow adaptation and other challenges that vary from country to another. Asian countries would have to transform their systems so as to integrate with the rest of the world. In this scenario, e-Health and the Internet seem to be the way forward.

Information Technology

Healthcare IT in Asia

Ready for Transformation

Asia is ready for rapid technological changes happening in health care globally. More over, in country like India with such a vast population it might benefit the most.

Healthcare IT in Asia

Learning from the Global Experience

As for the developing economies in Asia, they are also working on healthcare reform and are building their infrastructure to meet the needs of the new demands in healthcare.

Healthcare IT in Asia

Start with the Basics

All areas of Healthcare IT need further development. In fact, they will be in a state of evolution for a long time.

Healthcare IT in Australia

Driven by e-Health

Evidence suggests that the use of ICT in health, i.e. e-health / telehealth / telemedicine has a potential to address critical problems in the health sector.

Healthcare IT in India

An optimistic outlook

It is reassuring to see that the central government and several state governments have accepted Telemedicine as a means to provide healthcare.We are optimistic that the present digital divide in healthcare, existing between the haves and the have nots, will gradually shrink.

Healthcare IT in UAE

An innovative transformation

Healthcare in the UAE is undergoing innovative transformation to better meet the needs of the current as well as the anticipated population growth.

Interoperability

Healthcare IT's big challenge

The inability to move clinical data from place to place—that is to say, the lack of interoperability—clearly hinders delivery of good care around the world.

Interoperability

Banking on market demand

There is still a lot of room for improvement for interoperability in healthcare. We still see issues in solutions that are not able to be integrated, which costs healthcare institutions a lot of money to fix and causes delays to the implementation of critical solutions.

IT in Healthcare

Adoption in Asia Pacific

Challenges such as rising healthcare costs, demand for better quality of healthcare, increasing labour shortage and fragmented healthcare system are making it imperative for healthcare organisation to integrate IT solutions in their administrative and clinical workflow.

A Look into the Future

The ‘Hippocratic Oath’ mentions the teaching of knowledge and leaving
jobs to professionals; in the future, the professional may be a robot. Historically, technological changes have come at a manageable pace; today, the potential danger is that a lot of new technologies are emerging very quickly. We, therefore, need to look forward to what may happen in order to be better prepared for the future.

Enhancing Self-Management of Chronic Low Back Pain

Role of a patient-centred website

There exists, from the patients’ point-of-view, an information gap between general knowledge about treatment and prevention, and capacities to change behaviours. Often, delivered information does not address
specific difficulties of the patients.

Benchmarking and Accrediting in Health Informatics

Driving up quality and reducing risk

Quality assurance and continuous development of health information and
IT services in healthcare is a key patient safety and business issue. A part of this is the need to assure the professionalism of individual practitioners
as well as the services themselves.

Patient Proxies in Decision-Making

What computers can’t capture

Healthcare policy makers face the challenging task of balancing managements’ requirements for quantified information with the often
unmeasurable realities of clinical decisionmaking. Decision-making
and healthcare policies need to be responsive to biomedical, personal,
cultural, as well as economic needs.