Volume 15 - Issue 4, 2015

CancerIn 17 countries of the European Union, cancer has overtaken cardiovascular disease as the leading cause for premature death. In Europe in 2012, there were 3.75 million new cases of cancer, with 1.75 million deaths, equivalent to a cancer death every 20 seconds. Upward pressure on appropriate health spending and the needs of ageing populations need to be factored in, otherwise by 2050 we will face an...

Editor-In-Chief Prof. Lluís Donoso Bach Hospital Clinic – University Of Barcelona, Spain Honorary Board Member Prof. Iain Mccall UK (Retired) Editorial Board Members Prof. Stephen Baker Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, U.S. Prof. Hans Blickman University Of Rochester Medical Center, U.S. Prof. Georg Bongartz University Of Basel, Switzerland Prof. Davide Caramella University Of Pisa, Italy...

Precision in medicine is a popular notion: precision to target an individual, precision to target a tumour, precision to target a molecule within a tumour. On occasion, this notion of precision no doubt evokes a crude analogy with images of the laser-guided missiles of war. As with modern warfare waged on any enemy, the war on cancer will use precision tools in order to win – such is the hope, which is...

Place matters. Everything we do happens somewhere and that place can offer great insights. A place based approach is powerful. geography as a science provides both content and context for our work and facilitates our understanding of the world. By linking all sorts of data through their common geography, we can analyse, visualise, and detect patterns that drive informed action. For this reason, place matte...

Redesigning cancer services in the acute setting is the only way to cope with growing demand. A transformation of cancer services in the UK needs to be brought about as a matter of urgency if there is to be any hope of matching current, not to mention future, demand with supply. Incidence of cancer is rising by two to three percent per annum and in some tumour sites the figure is higher. By 2030, there cou...

Several medical societies recommend annual lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) for certain individuals at high risk. However, the value of adding computer-aided detection to improve LDCT screening accuracy remains unclear. Executive Summary: ECRI Perspectives In June 2011, the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s (NCI’s) National Lung Screening Trial (n = 53,454 current or former...

As the debate continues over optimal mammographic screening ages and intervals, technology is moving apace. Tomosynthesis is being rapidly adopted by healthcare providers, who either upgrade existing 2D units or purchase new 3D units. The market is also becoming more consumer-driven due to increased patient awareness of breast density and breast cancer risk factors and breast density legislation in many sta...

Whilst mammography remains the most consistent modality for breast cancer detection, it is neither foolproof nor perfect. Additional modalities are required to supplement mammography in order to further increase accurate detection of breast abnormalities. Targeted breast ultrasound and MRI are modalities that are used currently as an adjunct to mammography, and again these are not without limitations. Some...

Shear wave elastography (SWE) has become widely accepted in clinical practice at breast centres around the world. Studies have demonstrated that SWE has reduced the number of unnecessary biopsies, helped prevent false negative diagnoses, and improved overall diagnostic confidence and patient management (Berg et al. 2012; Evans et al. 2012). With data from over 60 peer-reviewed publications, shear wave tech...

Medical imaging is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role at many points in the cancer patient journey, from early detection as part of screening through to survivorship and/or end of life care. Reliance on imaging to contribute to decision making is substantive; a review of Cancer Care Ontario’s Lung Diagnostic Pathway revealed 22 touch points where a patient may have imaging as part of their diagno...

Over the past several decades there have been significant and important improvements in the care of patients diagnosed with cancer, and there are currently an estimated 14.5 million survivors of cancer in the U.S., or approximately 4.5% of the total population (DeSantis et al. 2014). One unintended consequence of this success is a growing population of patients with cancer treatment-related cardiovascular...

See Also: Patient Power Infographic...

Computed Tomography (CT) ranks as one of the top five medical developments of the last 40 years, with its inventors being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979 (Radiologyinfo. org 2011). From the first generation of CT scanners in the 1970s to the fourth generation scanners of today, the technological improvements of CT in speed, resolution and patient comfort have been immense. Owing to technological...

Medical care in the Netherlands is organised through a gatekeeper, the general practitioner (GP). Originally, the GP would take care of the entire spectrum of medical care personally, in his or her office, often aided by a partner. When time and paperwork constraints made this more difficult, organisations sprang up that centralised medical diagnostics services regionally for groups of GPs. In the Netherlan...

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (McLuhan) Wasteful, unhelpful imaging helps nobody, and may be associated with patient harms through unneeded and unwanted intervention. Appropriate imaging through referral guidance is advocated through the Bonn Call-for-Action (International Atomic Energy Authority and World Health Organization 2013), with supporting tools such as clinical decision...

The aim of administering contrast media in medical imaging is to improve image contrast and the diagnostic efficacy of the imaging examination being undertaken. Developments in the manufacture of iodinated contrast media have led to an increase in safety standards. However, the administration of iodinated contrast media still provides a potential small risk to the patient. The purpose of this review is t...

The role of the environment in the transmission of healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) is increasingly recognised, requiring a new approach to the selection of materials for objects frequently touched by healthcare workers, patients and visitors that can serve as reservoirs of infection. There are many technologies and materials on the market, but none are as effective under typical indoor conditions...

Management cannot work without defining and utilising key performance indicators (KPI) to control entire business procedures. This is also a must for the health management sector. Cuts in reimbursement, higher demand from patients and referring physicians combined with a permanently varying political and legal framework require high transparency and the ability to react quickly, change strategies and optim...

In an ordinary market, the client uses their knowledge and the resources available in order to make purchases, which will cover their needs. Depending on their knowledge, their needs and the money that they possess, they compare prices and products in order to make informed decisions on what to buy. When it comes to their healthcare, the client does not have specific knowledge, so they seek a physician. T...

Healthcare organisations need to make much better use of the health data that they hold and to share that use with other organisations in order to scale up their learning opportunities and improve the quality and efficiency of the healthcare they provide. At the level of the individual patient, guideline and decision support systems, notification and alerting components and analytic tools need to process in...

Beginning in 1996, hospitals in the Hamilton, Ontario, Canada area started coming together to form Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS), a family of seven hospitals, a cancer centre and an urgent care centre, serving more than 2.3 million residents of Hamilton and South Central Ontario, Canada. HHS is the second largest hospital group in Ontario, and serves as a regional referral centre for cardiac, stroke, burns...

The demographic trends projected over the long term reveal that Europe is ‘turning increasingly grey’ in the coming decades. By 2025 more than 20 percent of Europeans will be 65 or over, with a particularly rapid increase in the number of over 80s. This ageing trend will continue, and it is expected that by 2060 more than 30 percent will be 65 or over and the number of over 80s will reach 12 percent of...

The National Health Service (NHS) must work hard to protect the health and well being of its workforce. Failure to do so costs organisations across the system dearly but, more importantly, patient care may suffer. What does it feel like to be unable to do your job properly through lack of time, staff shortages or financial constraints? Today, many NHS clinicians and managers (and probably support staff too...

According to a scientific study published in 2013 by acclaimed NASA toxicologist Dr. John T. James, an estimated 210,000 to 440,000 people die each year due to preventable medical errors (James 2013). Further examination reveals that medical errors would then be the third largest cause of death in the United States (Allen 2013). A driving component of healthcare reform in the United States is the mandate to...

Following HealthManagement. org's articles on blogging (La Calle et al. 2015) and tweeting (Wong and Mathieu 2015), in this issue, HealthManagement.org puts the hospital magazine in focus. Kathy Smith, Vice President of Marketing & Communications at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and director of the quarterly publication, Johns Hopkins Health, shares her tips on how to create a magazine that works for both...

Seguro Popular: Mexico’s Progress in Protecting the Right to Health Mexicans are embracing human rights more than ever before, and Mexico’s constitution has recognised that healthcare is a universal right for more than thirty years. And yet, as made obvious by conflicts over 'Obamacare' in the United States (Council of Economic Advisers 2015), this most obvious of rights is rarely accepted without deba...

1. What are your key areas of interest and research? Helping to drive the future evolution of electronic health records (EHRs) to be a rich, holistic and smart information resource to all players involved in healthcare and research. My present areas of focus include semantic interoperability, enabling meaning to be understood by people and computers when data are shared between different information systems...

1. What are your key areas of interest and research? Occult fractures and outcome in acute ankle injuries and using MR-Ultrasound to treat nerve root pain. Education is a key area of interest for me in my role as President of the British Institute of Radiology and in my own practice. 2. What are the major challenges in your field? One of my passions is getting radiologists working as doctors. The biggest...