Editorial

We hear often about patient-centred care and patient involvement, but how aware are you really of the experiences and needs of the patients you serve? Do you know their views of health services and systems they navigate, beyond your experiences of individual interactions or information reported in patient ‘satisfaction’ surveys? To what extent do patients in your hospitals and communities understand a...

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...

Datebook

The opportunity to mingle with renowned radiologists from Europe, North America and beyond whilst discussing and learning about management and leadership comes just once a year.The 2015 Management in Radiology Annual Scientific Meeting takes place in the elegant surroundings of Fairmont Rey Juan Carlos Hotel in the heart of Barcelona from 8-9 October.Thursday 8 October 2015 09:00 Welcome and Introduction P...

The EUROSON 2015 congress is organised by the Hellenic Society of Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology (HSUMB) and the European Federation of Societies of Utrasound of Medicine and Biology (EFSUMB). The delegates are the presidents of each national society and the president of EFSUMB. The scope of the congress is to unite all medical specialties by linking them with ultrasound. Ultrasound is a modality that...

Elastography of the Cervix To Detect Early Labour Signs Shows Promise Newly published research raises the possibility of using elastography to detect cervical stiffness changes that indicate an increased risk of preterm labour in pregnant women. Currently stiffness is assessed by manual palpation of the cervix, a subjective measure, where as elastography allows quantitative measurement. HealthManagement.or...

Cover Story

As European health services face an ageing population and an increase in chronic diseases, the challenge is to make healthcare sustainable. There is already a mismatch between available services and patient needs across the healthcare continuum, and many patients face fragmentation of care. Patient empowerment is one way to address this gap in moving from disease-centred to patientcentred care. The Europea...

Patient portals are secure online websites that offer patients access to personal health information. Basic portals (portals 1.0) are windows into electronic records, built into or added on to existing electronic health records (EHR). Portals 2.0 have advanced functionality, including health information exchange and web 2.0 capabilities such as social networking. These enable patients to make appointments,...

During the 2000s, England’s National Health Service spent an extra $1.5 billion per year in an attempt to bring its information systems into the 21st century. Over the decade that followed we spent around $15 billion. That’s a lot of money and there has been much debate about what all this money delivered. But there is an equally interesting question that is rarely asked: How much did ordinary people s...

Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is an inherited, chronic, progressive condition in which cysts develop in the kidneys and other organs (Torres et al. 2007; Chapman et al. 2015; Ong et al. 2015). ADPKD is an important cause of chronic kidney disease, accounting for around one in ten of all patients needing renal replacement therapy (RRT) via dialysis or kidney transplantation (Spithoven...

Patient Activism, Patient Advocacy or Patient Engagement. Whatever label you give it, one thing is for certain: the movement towards Patient Power is central to the future of healthcare. While patient activism pre-dates the explosion of the web, the trend towards patients participating in their own healthcare goes hand-in-hand with the development of eHealth and mHealth as patient advocates use cyber space...

After an hour of describing a recent admission to hospital for treatment of pneumonia, ‘Mary’ paused and said “You know, I couldn’t fault the technical care, but…I was treated like a lump of clay…people came and went…they did things to me ... staff didn’t tell me what they were doing, who they were or how I was going…and that is my lasting memory of my care.” ‘Patient-centred’ has b...

Nothing about me without me An empowered activated patient: Understands their health condition and its effect on their body. Feels able to participate in decision-making with their healthcare professionals Feels able to make informed choices about treatment. Understands the need to make necessary changes to their lifestyle for managing their condition. Is able to challenge and ask questions of the healt...

Point-of-View

The possibilities for the future of minimally invasive procedures through image guided therapy are practically endless. At the moment we perceive image guided therapy as an enabling diagnostic technology for minimally invasive therapy. But its capabilities won’t end there; there will be smarter therapeutic devices that not only guide treatment through vascular imaging but also deliver the disease t...

Dr. Roberto Tarducci, Chief of the Medical Physics Dept, Santa Maria della Misericordia- Azienda Ospedaliera di Perugia, shares his thoughts on the progress of their project to enable remote patient access to their diagnostic data. This project is just the latest stage in its transformation of access to and storage of images from its radiology and nuclear medicine services, with the aim of enhancing patien...

Reducing dose to improve the long-term health and Safety of preemies and neonatal patients Interview with Prof. Dr. Maria-Helena Smet, Paediatric Radiologist in the Department of Radiology at University Hospitals Leuven (UZ Leuven) and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium To visit UZ Leuven’s new, state-of-the-art neonatal and preemie NICU, you hav...

Management Matrix

The Challenge of Our Times Recent years have seen an increasing awareness that climate change is of dramatic importance not only for its impact on the environment, but also on human health. The last message has been launched by a relevant religious and moral leader: Pope Francis with his Encyclical “Laudato si” (Francis 2015). Those who are working in healthcare, from policymakers to daily hospita...

Fear not! This is not another diatribe for or against the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This is intended to be a discussion about terminology of programmes/services in the everchanging healthcare environment, and the intended meaning as opposed to the perceived meaning. The 1980s brought us the Health Maintenance Organization, or HMO. This programme was developed by the insurance industry to rein in spi...

Understanding Aerodynamics The word aerodynamic has many definitions. My favourite is my own personal amalgamation of over ten different definitions that I found online: “The science of aerodynamics is the study of the resulting interactions between an object and air.” There are most certainly more advanced definitions, but to those of us who are not aeronautical engineers, no definition that I have f...

“Buzzwords abound in healthcare. The latest, ‘Integration’, will only be achieved by effective collaboration across all boundaries; ‘partnership working’, ‘joint working’ and ‘joined-up thinking’ we have heard so much about for so long,” says Shirley Cramer, CEO of the Institute of Healthcare Management (IHM)." Integration has been an overt policy goal of governments over the last two...

Radiology, Safety, Quality, Dose Management

Political Background Safety and quality have been highlighted by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (European Commission Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health Expert Panel 2014). The Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health was tasked with considering the core dimensions of quality of healthcare, including patient safety. The Expert Pan...

Meeting the Challenges Precursors of quality management, quality control and quality improvement initiatives have been known since the early 20th century. However, the industrial revolution and particularly the rapid prosperity of the automobile industry raised quality issues to a new dimension, which soon became an integral part of industrial process management. In the last decades quality management also...

As breast density legislation is introduced in more and more states of the USA to inform women that they have dense breasts and to promote discussion of supplemental screening, research into technology, frequency and other factors continues. A study by the National Cancer Institute funded Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC), published 18 May in Annals of Internal Medicine, led by Prof. Karla Kerl...

Prof. Murray Rebner is Immediate Past President Society of Breast Imaging; Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Molecular Imaging, Oakland University, William Beaumont School of Medicine; Director, Division of Breast Imaging, Beaumont Health System, Royal Oak Campus. HealthManagement.org spoke to Prof. Rebner recently about the hot topic of breast density. Legislation to inform women about their breast d...

The first randomised controlled trial (RCT) on MRI and mammography in women with extremely dense breasts is underway in the Netherlands. Breast Cancer Screening With MRI in Women Aged 50-75 Years With Extremely Dense Breast Tissue: the DENSE Trial (clinicaltrials. gov/ct2/show/NCT01315015) aims to determine the cost-effectiveness of biennial screening with mammography and MRI compared to mammography alone...

Which vendors provide best value? Speech recognition systems for physicians to use to dictate letters and reports promise increased efficiency and reduced transcription costs. Systems can either be front-end (speech to text recognition in real time) or back-end (speech to text conversion after the dictation has taken place). KLAS Research interviewed healthcare providers about three front-end systems, and...

Until very recently, radiology was looked upon very favourably by many seniors at American medical schools. As they finalised their choice of residency training, our specialty had acquired an allure based on the exciting technology at our disposal, the relatively high income available to newly minted graduates of fellowship programmes, (because nearly all those completing residency programmes in America ha...

The future of primary care in the global health approach Background and Trends Healthcare services have been under great pressure during recent years, especially when the economic and financial crisis put a remarkable emphasis on sustainability. It is generally accepted that developed countries’ economies are not going to grow until infinity and the capacity of the emergent economies to lead the world...

In 2010, the European Commission proposed the 10-year strategy, Europe 2020, aimed at stimulating economic growth across the EU bloc. An important pillar of the 2020 drive is the creation of the Digital Single Market with the use of Big Data for ‘eHealth’ and ‘mHealth’ central to the initiative. The aim is to dramatically improve the quality, efficacy and effectiveness of healthcare and management...

The world heart federation’s commitment: 25% by the year 2025 Cardiovascular disease (CVD), including heart disease and stroke, is the leading cause of death around the world, most surpris- ingly in low and middle-income coun- tries. CVD alone causes one in three deaths globally, claiming over 17 million lives a year (World Health Organisation, 2015). Yet non-communicable diseases (NCDs) receive less...

Technology Update

Portable Ultrasonic Scanning systems provide two-dimensional (2D) images of soft tissue and moving structures (eg, heart, fetus) for a variety of clinical applications. Depending on the transducer and calculation packages available, portable scanners can be used for abdominal, obstetric/gynaecologic, urologic, smallparts (eg, thyroid, prostate, breast), cardiac, and other examinations. Portable systems typ...

Compass

In Europe, euthanasia, the act of assisting with the death of a person at their express request, is only legal in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - the Benelux. This sensitive practice has strong voices both for and against. HealthManagement.org spoke to two leading advocates on the euthanasia issue. They shared their views on why they support or oppose this controversial act. Opposed Dr Kevin Fitz...

Zoom On Profiles

...one single thing escapes fate: faith and wisdom Dr. Geneviève Derumeaux is Professor and Head of the Department of Echocardiography, Louis Pradel University Hospital, Lyon, France, She pioneered tissue Doppler imaging and it is her goal to create a subspeciality of noninvasive imaging. 1. What are your key areas of interest and research? I pioneered the assessment of t...

“Understand stakeholders’ needs and strategies – sometimes before they are aware of them themselves Morten Elbæk Petersen is the CEO of the innovative Danish public health portal sundhed.dk. Launched in 2002 for citizens and health professionals and the largest patient portal in Europe, the site won Petersen the HIMSS Europe eHealth Leadership Award this year. Today, twenty per cent of the Danis...



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