Teamwork and care coordination are of increasing importance to health care delivery and patient safety and health. This thesis aims at developing agents that are able to make intelligent information sharing decisions to support a diverse, evolving team of care providers in constructing and maintaining a shared plan that operates in uncertain environments and over a long time horizon.

The passage of federal healthcare reform legislation, in combination with other factors, makes it likely that the next few years will be a major period of consolidation for healthcare organizations. This article examines the seven key forces reshaping healthcare delivery--from insurance industry consolidation to cost inflation to the increasing gap between financially strong and struggling prov...

Clinical health information technologies (HIT) are widely viewed as essential tools for improving the quality and efficiency of health care delivery. Medicaid agencies make substantial investments in information technology (IT), have much to gain through the widespread use of clinical HIT, and can have significant influence on the adoption of HIT by providers. Medicaid agencies, however, face l...

Psychologists practice in an increasingly diverse range of health care delivery systems. The following guidelines are intended to assist psychologists, other health care providers, administrators in health care delivery systems, and the public to conceptualize the roles and responsibilities of psychologists in these diverse contexts. These guidelines revise and build upon earlier guidelines reg...

BACKGROUND Telemedical Maritime Assistance Service (TMAS) is one of the fundamental components of medical assistance delivery at sea. However, while onshore telemedicine is undergoing a fast growth, these research and clinical investments unfortunately did not yet benefit for telemedicine at sea. DIVERGENCES BETWEEN TELEMEDICINE AT SEA AND ONSHORE While telemedicine aims at providing distant ...

The need for corporate compliance programs in health care delivery systems is ever increasing. This article identifies the key items a good program should contain, and addresses issues raised by the existence of a program as well as its implementation.

One of the key indicators of the success, maturity, and overall health of a research field is its ability to attract and train bright and talented young investigators. In this regard, the recent Young Investigator Competition at the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research (QCOR) conference is a perfect testament to the fact that our field is vibrant and thriving. As a...

At West Virginia University, we were one of the first to implement a Web-based distributed multimedia medical record1, enabling health care providers to collaborate to improve health care delivery. Advanced Research Testbed for Medical Informatics (ARTEMIS) is an open-architecture implementation of collaboration technology in the health care arena that utilized informationsharing, team coordina...

The relationship of religion and health is often misunderstood owing to a tendency to concentrate on the medical model and to ignore the wider context of heath care. A conceptual--as opposed to a historical--examination of this context reveals nine central religious ideas or categories which provide an ethical foundation and heritage for medical practice and health care delivery. These include ...

Whether patient satisfaction scores can act as a catalyst for improving health care is highly debated. Some argue that pursuing patient satisfaction is overemphasized and potentially at odds with providing good care because it leads providers to overtest and overtreat patients and to bend to unreasonable patient demands, all to improve their ratings. Others cite studies showing that high patien...