The healthcare sector is growing rapidly and taking up a significant portion of the GDP in developed countries. The healthcare industry faces significant challenges such as ballooning costs, shortage of qualified personnel, rapidly aging population, and increase of chronic and epidemic diseases. Information technology (IT) has been suggested as a mitigator for some of these challenges. Particul...

faced with the challenges of healthcare reform, skills and new capabilities are needed to support the reform and it is of crucial importance in africa where shortages affects the health system resilience. edwards et al provides a good example of the challenge of implementing a mentoring program in one province in a sub-saharan country. from this example, various aspects of strengthening the cap...

To The Editor: There is an increasing need to incorporate the use of electronic medical records EMR in our healthcare delivery. The advancement in information technology and its impact in all sectors including healthcare has accelerated this need amidst the ever growing challenges facing healthcare today. These challenges include; reducing preventable errors, improving communication among healt...

An efficient, integrated health services delivery enterprise requires the ability to coordinate service delivery across the provider network and avoid duplication of services. It must be able to associate relevant clinical information with patients regardless of which facility delivered the services. There are significant challenges in collecting, organizing, and extracting value from data coll...

Efforts to achieve effective and meaningful patient and public involvement (PPI) in healthcare have existed for nearly a century, albeit with limited success. This brief commentary discusses a recent paper by Carter and Martin exploring the "Challenges Facing Healthwatch, a New Consumer Champion in England," and places these challenges in the context of the broader struggle to give a voice to h...

Over the years, online healthcare has become a crucial part of the healthcare sector as there is growing interest amongst people for using the Internet to access health-related information and services. In spite of many benefits of online healthcare, its quality is a cause of concern as the consequences of inaccurate and misleading information could be dangerous. With the advancement in informa...

Collaboration among nomadic healthcare providers presents unique challenges. This paper describes a set of requirements and an implementation approach to collaboration architecture to meet these challenges.