All over the world, the cost of heath care delivery is increasing. This has resulted into health sector reforms calling for cost containment and quality improvements (Buchan, 2000). Healthcare delivery is unique in that it is labor intensive with expenditure on human resources accounting for 60-80% of the total recurrent costs (Shipp, 1998). The levels and skill mix of the staff employed that i...

Clinical documentation is central to patient care. The success of electronic health record system adoption may depend on how well such systems support clinical documentation. A major goal of integrating clinical documentation into electronic heath record systems is to generate reusable data. As a result, there has been an emphasis on deploying computer-based documentation systems that prioritiz...

Surgical disease is an important cause of preventable mortality and morbidity, but it is not clear how best to deliver surgical services to under-served rural populations in poorer countries. South Africa's policy is to restructure heath services, with district hospitals and health centres becoming the primary delivery vehicle for quality health care to all South Africans. Among other things th...

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative designed to facilitate the integration of healthcare information systems in order to exchange health care information in a secure, private and efficient manner. Solution vendors now offer IHE integration profiles as web services that can be integrated locally or regionally to coordinate standard heath care activities such as clinical ...

The convergence of need between improved clinical care and post genomics research presents a unique challenge to restructuring information flow so that it benefits both without compromising patient safety or confidentiality. The CLEF project aims to link-up heath care with bioinformatics to build a collaborative research platform that enables a more effective biomedical research. In that, it ad...

Today that requirements engineer has at his or her disposal a plethora of field tested approaches in which to elicit system requirements. In some specific domains, however, the generality of the methods prevents them from being taken to the word. The health care domain is one of such domains. Not only it is a complex domain with many subtleties but it also presents many political and legal issu...

Interprofessional education (IPE) is commonly advocated in policy documentation as a means of enhancing collaboration between heath and social care staff. However, little is known about the effects of this type of education. This paper reports findings from a systematic review which was commissioned to search and begin assessing the quality of the published evidence relating to the effects of I...

Connected Health involves the use of ICT to improve healthcare quality and outcomes. In a connected heath environment, stakeholders can struggle to make best use of this information coming from a variety of sources. Given this, we are investigating the challenge of how to use available information to make informed decisions about the care pathway which the patient should follow to ensure that p...

Worldwide, 250,000-280,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth every year and an estimated 6.55 million children die under the age of five. The majority of maternal deaths occur during or immediately after childbirth, while 43% of child death occurs during the first 28 days of life. However, the progress in limiting these has been slow and sporadic. In this supplement of five papers, we a...

Crit Care Med 2016 • Volume 44 • Number 12 (Suppl.) more AHP participating in social media during 2016 CCC compared to 2015 (34% vs 14% of the top 50 accounts; p=0.047). The number of followers of AHP accounts were significantly fewer than the number of followers of the physician accounts (800 ± 626 followers vs 1,608 ± 2,282 followers; p=0.02), but there was no significant difference in number...