All Articles

Identifying, Controlling, and Reducing Overhead Costs

Precisely Defining Indirect Overhead Costs or Diagnosis/Treatment-related Expenses is a Challenge   Certain operating expenses are necessary to keep businesses functioning. However, in healthcare, drawing clear boundaries between diagnosis/treatment-related expenses and overhead costs is not always easy. In some cases, overhead expenses might...

Standardizing Quality of Care

How and Why Standardization Can Help Healthcare Providers Improve Quality and Increase Efficiency   Standards can improve efficiency, particularly in complex areas such as healthcare. Standardized clinical pathways are increasingly influencing the debate about sustainable, affordable, and efficient healthcare. Proven, standardized procedures...

Medicine, Technology and Humanity Intertwined: Rambam Health Care Campus

RAMBAM HEALTH CARE CAMPUS   The philosophy at Rambam Health Care is medicine, technology and humanity intertwined. Please explain.   Rambam is a very uniquely positioned hospital. It started in 1938 as a hospital for patients, founded by the British mandatory regime, and has grown to be a major academic hospital that includes the Faculty...

Healthcare Without Borders Infographic

The Abdomen

Managing the abdomen and its complications in the intensive care unit is the subject of our Cover Story. First, Jan de Waele considers the ‏data on new antibiotics for complicated intra-abdominal ‏infections. While these, singly and in combination, show‏ promise, he cautions that recent studies have certain shortcomings from a critical care perspective,...

Three Criteria Can Identify Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Patients for Potential Organ Donation

Three objective criteria could identify out-of hospital  ‏cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients with ‏zero chance of survival, who can be considered ‏for organ donation. Prof. Xavier Jouven, Georges ‏Pompidou European Hospital, Paris, and ‏colleagues, analysed data from two registries and ‏a clinical trial, and found that there is essentially ‏no chance...

Intensive Care Syndrome: Promoting Independence and Return to Employment (InS:PIRE)

A New Model for ICU Rehabilitation  It is now well established that many patients ‏and caregivers suffer physical, psychological ‏and social problems in the years ‏and months following critical care discharge ‏(Herridge et al. 2011). Similar to many centres, ‏our intensive care unit (ICU) had no follow-up ‏service available to support patients...

The Burden Caused by Administrators and Managers: a Euro-American Jumble

We argue that a jumble of rules, protocols, checklists has emerged, ‏which jeopardises not only the pivotal relationship between doctor and ‏patient, but also the quality and costs of care, and the quality of future ‏healthcare workers. It must be emphasised that the introduction of ‏protocols and checklists in clinical medicine has improved care...

Telemedicine is the Future

Professor Gernot Marx is Director of the Department of Intensive Care  ‏Medicine and Intermediate Care, University Hospital Aachen, and ‏Professor of Anaesthesiology and Operative Intensive Care Medicine at ‏RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. Dr. Marx is a member of ‏the Intensive Care Medicine Scientific Subcommittee of the European ‏Society...

Critical Care in Brazil

Brazil is the largest country in South America, and ranks fifth in the  ‏list of the most populous countries, with a population of approximately ‏209 million people (84% urban). It is a large country with ‏many challenges that affect the healthcare sector, such as economic ‏inequalities, and the demographic transition with an ageing population ‏(>10%...