Editorial

Think back to January 1, 2020. Can you even remember what the outlook was for a new decade in your area of healthcare? The first phase of the deadly coronavirus disease, COVID-19, has practically swept away any memory of the status quo before it hit like a tsunami and healthcare scrambled to fight it. Today, months later, more than 200 countries and territories have been hit by the virus, with over 3 mill...

Point-of-View

COVID-19 is a new and largely unknown disease, which makes it difficult for clinicians to make prognostic decisions. CoviLake Niguarda is a project aimed at creating AI algorithms and a decision support system (DSS) feeding from a datalake of all relevant patient information to support clinical decision-making on the front line. Since the first COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, researchers are collec...

How European healthcare systems can rebuild in the post-COVID-19 era. The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the very foundation on which the European healthcare system is based. So many revelations, so many regrets. To bring this into perspective, let us look at some hard numbers. At the time of writing this article, the novel coronavirus had infected more than 800,000 people (1) in Europe alone, claiming the...

The XERO Exchange Network, a new image sharing technology from Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging solution has been launched by the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative, a collaboration of hospital trusts that collectively covers a population of over three million patients. A new image sharing system has just been launched and is now available in seven trusts across Yorkshire and the Humber to manage hi...

GE Healthcare introduces an out-of-the-box COVID-19 tailored solution that automatically captures data and provides quick and relevant COVID-19 clinical insights. As the tsunami of Coronavirus “COVID-19” (SARS-CoV-2) cases surged across the globe from east to west, the scaling up of Intensive Care Units (ICU) in Europe accelerated to increase patient capacity and prepare clinical staff for its immine...

The rapid global distribution of the Coronavirus and the fear of collapsing healthcare systems have forced hospitals to concentrate on the treatment of COVID-19 patients and allocate their resources accordingly. As a consequence up to 80% of the elective cardiovascular (CV) interventions have been indefinitely postponed.1 This measure resulted in a number of alarming developments. One was that the early pre...

How is COVID-19 affecting patient management? Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, critical care units are overloaded with patients who require urgent and successful guided intubation for treatment and airway management. The more patients with COVID-19 there are, the greater is the need for treatment and continued patient management. What does this mean for endoscopy patients? All endoscopies on COVID-19...

Evaluating the severity of pulmonary disease burden can help predict patient outcome in COVID-19 (Colombi et al. 2020; Revel et al. 2020). Quantifying lung pathology is, therefore, a crucial element in the resource and capacity management optimization of healthcare systems. The need to make a more objective decision on whether or not to send a patient home or to the ICU is growing together with the surge in...

Management Matters

Summary: Staff management during critical times can be and often is very challenging. Therefore, there is a need to learn new processes, acquire new skills/information and use new approaches. A veteran nursing expert talks about how you train, inform and support your staff to achieve the best possible outcomes during a crisis. Work during a crisis is always challenging. Even if we had similar experie...

Cover Story

Summary: A physician examines how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the health of patients and healthcare workers, and proposes strategies to improve wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 offers a new challenge for the world community not seen since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (Bernhardt 2020). The world community, in large part, has come together in this crisis to share ideas, crowdsource, and i...

Guiseppe Galati is a consultant cardiologist at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy. His specialties include chronic heart failure, cardiac magnetic resonance, echocardiography, myocardial disease, public health and health economics. HealthManagement.org spoke to Dr. Galati about the management of COVID-19 in Italy. Do you think your country used a good strategy to contain the virus? Have any other cou...

Prof. Mamas A. Mamas is a structural interventional cardiologist, treating patients with underlying coronary artery with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in both the elective and emergency setting and undertaking Transcatheter Aortic Valve Interventions (TAVI). He is also the Associate Editor of Circulation Cardiovascular Interventions and leads a large research groups focussed around electronic hea...

Summary: Tan Tock Seng Hospital, a large multi-disciplinary public hospital in Singapore enters into the future of Hospital Operations with Command, Control & Communications (C3) capabilities at its new Integrated Operations Command Centre. On 22 Jan 2020, Singapore raised its Disease Outbreak Response System Condition (DORSCON) (Singapore Government 2020) level from green to yellow, in the face of...

Summary: For the past 15 years Prof. Andy Tatem has been working with population data globally, and his team was one of the first to analyse the COVID-19 spread and interventions during the outbreak in China. He speaks with HealthManagement.org about public health measures, COVID-19 changing the nature of research, and how data could and should be used in a pandemic context. It definitely is. The early...

Summary: Communication during a crisis is always a challenge and even more so with the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. A group of experts from Ghent University in Belgium talked to HealthManagement.org about the elements of a communication strategy, workflow arrangements and adjustments required in critical times and the ways of how COVID-19 is changing communication as we know it. While seasonal inf...

Summary: A radiologist working with COVID-19 patients in Russia looks at how technology has aided imaging-based diagnosis and what this could mean for future practice in grading disease severity. The pandemic of COVID-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge to modern global healthcare. Today everybody understands that diagnostic imaging has critical importance in detection, grading, and follow-up of t...

Summary: Renowned surgeon and healthcare futurist Rafael Grossman speaks to HealthManagement.org on telehealth, robotic-assisted surgery and a new healthcare mindset in a post COVID-19 world. What are your most important impressions in terms of attitudes towards and implemen- tation of telemedicine in the present COVID-19 environment? One good thing that has come out of this horrible pandemic and...

Summary: Under pressure in the age of COVID-19, David Koff stresses that researchers need to maintain high standards for their offerings to have value to the medical world. COVID-19 is the worst pandemic the world has been going through since the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which claimed the lives of millions of people. As we watch the death toll climbing above that of the dreaded 2003 SARS-CoV-2 coronavir...

Summary: Quarantining and public interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised concerns about a decrease in presentations for urgent and life-threatening cardiovascular diseases. Cardiovascular disease may remain undiagnosed for a longer duration. How can this be addressed? All members of the coronaviruses (CoV) are RNA viruses, which are known to contribute to the development of respiratory in...

Summary: The COVID-19 crisis has created many challenges for health systems around the world. Health leaders have to focus on sustaining their organisations at all levels, and the International Hospital Federation is offering its support to them through a number of projects. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic reminds us of how we are all interconnected. Whilst impacting different countries in different ways...

Summary: The use of virtual consultation and telemedicine is expanding rapidly due to the coronavirus crisis. Patients want to avoid hospitals and the health system prefers to keep non-infected patients away from hospitals to reduce congestion. Oliver Wyman consulting ensures that more than 50% of medical appointments worldwide have been provided through telemedicine during the crisis (Oliver Wyman 2020)....

Summary: The COVID-19 crisis has uncovered a plethora of issues with the health systems in Europe and is predicted to have enormous consequences – both in healthcare and elsewhere. In early April, our EXEC Editor-in-Chief Alexandre Lourenço talked to HealthManagement.org about the challenges hospitals in the EU have been facing and contemplated the changes in healthcare, economy and society post-pandemi...

Point-of-View

An innovative solution to ventilator shortages has been found in Spain – a relatively simple and cost-efficient alternative named RESPIRA. One of the major problems for hospitals fighting the COVID-19 pandemic has been the lack of emergency ventilation devices. GPAINNOVA, a multinational company from Spain, has a simple and efficient solution to this – RESPIRA. RESPIRA is an ICU ventilator based o...

Management of patient information and information standards regarding sharing, analysis and planning have become critical today. SNOMED International offers SNOMED CT, the world’s largest clinical terminology with a collection of 350,000+ clinical concepts for improved management of patient data. The global campaign to address COVID-19 is being advanced on many clinical and administrative fronts; across...

The serious health crisis in France, Italy, Spain and so many other countries highlights the crucial importance of access to medical oxygen for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Hospitals are faced with the need for increasing supplies of oxygen necessary for the survival of patients. The oxygen delivered to them is produced in factories and then bottled or transported i...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the need for more agile technical solutions that can quickly support researchers and clinical practitioners in diagnostics and treatments. Sharing data and knowledge is the key driver that can dramatically change the efficiency of political and health care decisions. Chest x-ray has been the main imaging method to diagnose the COVID-19 infection, but the sharing...

Winning Practices

Summary: An innovation expert talks about the challenging transformation journey of a hospital in Spain, triggered by the economic crisis and the growing digitalisation of the modern world. While realised mainly through introduction of technology, this journey is, first, about organisational innovation and change. Sant Joan de Déu (SJD) Barcelona Children’s Hospital is a private non-profit institution...



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