Intelligent Paradigms for Healthcare Enterprises: Systems Thinking : 9783540229032

This compendium brings together leading researchers in the fields of Intelligent Systems and healthcare aiming at medical engineers, healthcare managers and computer scientists worldwide. This book is an overview of intelligent paradigms and strategic investments that might payoff for the healthcare enterprise. Specifically, the reader will get ideas for efficiency enhancements for improving effectiveness and quality of care and for increasing patient safety. "Advanced Intelligent Paradigms in Healthcare" straddles technologic topics from DNA processing and automating medical second opinions in the lab, to telemedicine and chat spaces for rural patient outreach, among many others. In terms of management concerns, this book also explores systems approaches such as automated clinical guidelines, institutional workflow management, and best practices and lessons learned with actual applications.

The practice of medicine is information intensive, yet systemic thinking is confined to how the body works rather than how the healthcare system works. So it is refreshing to have the perspectives this book assembles in one place. That is, information systems in medical practices historically have tended to focus on automating individual functions (e.g., billing, procedure or room scheduling, and record keeping). Like other large industries that learned to contain runaway costs, healthcare is now automating more and more of these functions across larger expanses of the enterprise. As this happens, the debate is shifting beyond specific functions and basic transaction processing to ways to interoperate in order to improve performance and reduce errors. As with other more automated sectors, the focus is now turning to how to better engineer the knowledge and information management cycles that exist throughout the healthcare field, and ways to adapt and develop the healthcare enterprise itself. This is where stepping back and taking a systems view becomes important.

What makes the systems approach so challenging is that one must simultaneously shift the institutional focus to patient-centric; use that focus and improve interactions with patient communities; and also seek to improve the internal workflow and knowledge management for doctors, nurses, and other employees. These three perspectives (institution, consumers, and providers) are exactly what this book helps the reader to focus on.