Editor: Nilmini Wickramasinghe (Melbourne, Australia)

Proposal Submission Deadline: November 10, 2015

Full Chapters Due: January 26, 2016

Submission Date: March 23, 2016

Introduction

The Encyclopaedia of Healthcare Administration and Management brings together research on emerging topics, technologies, polices and other critical issues pertaining to delivering and managing superior health care in today’s 21st century.

Healthcare is an important industry that touches most, if not all of us at some time in our lives. Healthcare is noted for using leading edge technologies and embracing new scientific discoveries to enable better cures for diseases and better means to enable early detection of most life threatening diseases. However, the healthcare industry globally, and in the US specifically, has been extremely slow to adopt technologies that focus on better practice management and administrative needs. Presently, healthcare is grappling with many challenges both nationally and globally, including escalating costs, a move to a preventative care environment and a technology savvy patient with high expectations. Hence, it is useful to think of the major challenges facing today’s healthcare organizations in terms of the categories of demographics, technology, and finance. Healthcare organizations can respond to these challenges by focusing on three key solution strategies; namely:1. Access – caring for anyone, anytime, anywhere; 2. Quality – offering world class care and establishing integrated information repositories; and 3. Value – providing effective and efficient healthcare delivery. These three components are interconnected such that they continually impact on the other and all are necessary to meet the key challenges facing healthcare organizations today. Moreover, it is at the confluence of these key solution strategies that the role of ICTs (information communication technologies) in healthcare becomes of particular significance. ICT has a crucial role to play in improving access to healthcare.

The proposed encyclopaedia will provide an extensive and rich compilation of various ICT initiatives and the role that ICT plays and will play in the future of healthcare administration, delivery and management. International experts will address one or more of the areas of access quality and value and thereby represent ways in which healthcare delivery can be made superior and the healthcare industry can begin to address it’s the major challenges it faces in the 21st century so that ultimately the most important person in the web of healthcare players, the patient, can be confident of receiving high quality cost effective healthcare anytime anywhere. Furthermore, the reach and range of entries will not just be limited to traditional areas of healthcare but allied healthcare areas such as physio therapy (physical therapy) and myotherapy as well as alternate medical approaches such as acupuncture will also be addressed, most especially the role for technology to support and enable these areas so they too can provide better and focused patient centric outcomes.

Objective

The purpose of the proposed encyclopaedia is to bring together articles by international experts pertaining to critical concepts about the use, adoption, design and diffusion of ICTs in healthcare. Ultimately the role of ICTs in healthcare must address the challenges faced by today’s healthcare environment. These challenges can be best examined under the categories of access, quality and value and the management of medical technologies must relate to addressing one or more of these challenges.

Target Audience

The significance of ICTs in healthcare cannot be understated. A recent survey by the Cleveland Clinic noted that healthcare is the number one or two key issue for US citizens, ahead of employment, war and the economy. Healthcare is also the number two topic searched by users of the Internet worldwide and there are over 500,000 commercial websites dedicated solely to healthcare. In both the US and globally, healthcare cannot survive without the application and adoption of a whole spectrum of technologies and since healthcare impacts all of us it becomes a priority to all readers both healthcare professionals and general citizens to develop an understanding and appreciation of the various possibilities for ICT use within the healthcare domain. There is every reason to expect that this encyclopaedia will be used by all leading healthcare organizations throughout the US and globally as well as be a vital part of any universities reference collection in the area of ICT use in healthcare. Given that we extensively teach, research, and present in the area of management of medical technology throughout the world we are in no doubt as to the potential extent of the audience at a global scale.

Recommended Topics

Contributing authors will be encouraged to focus their article on one of the following five general themes or thrusts:

  1. Generation, adoption and utilization of ICT solutions in healthcare contexts. This thrust includes research on the organization, financial and managerial aspects of the process of need identification for medical technologies by healthcare organizations, and the acquisition, diffusion, utilization, updating, replacement, and resources allocation for such technologies.
  2. The nature of ICT solutions in healthcare contexts and innovation and the role they play in healthcare delivery. This thrust focuses on studies of the generation of medical technologies in industry, universities and the government sectors, and the processes by which such technologies are marketed to the healthcare delivery sector and their consequent impact on resolving the challenges faced by healthcare globally.
  3. Evaluation of ICT solutions in healthcare contexts. Included in this thrust are evaluation, assessment, monitoring and audit of costs and benefits from medical technologies, in healthcare delivery organizations and in the supporting industries, such as insurance, regulatory agencies, manufacturing of medical technology, and pharmaceuticals.
  4. Ethics, social implications and patient value. This thrust focuses on ethical considerations and the role of patients in the health delivery sector. A critical component here is that these ICT solutions in healthcare contexts are patient centric and comply with regulatory, privacy and security requirements.
  5. Management of ICT solutions in healthcare contexts and emerging technologies. This thrust focuses on studies of emerging technologies such as telemedicine, telehealth, computerized medical records, e-health, knowledge and knowledge management, knowledge in healthcare, and the future of medical informatics. Topics include diffusion, evaluation, economics, and applications of these technologies to the healthcare sector.

Specific topics include but are not limited to:

  1. Adoption and diffusion of HIS
  2. Affordable care
  3. Big data in healthcare
  4. Design and development of HIS
  5. e-health, e-mental health and m-health
  6. EMR/EHR/PHR
  7. Ethics and legal issues in healthcare delivery
  8. Global healthcare challenges
  9. HIPAA, privacy and security
  10. IT infrastructure
  11. Lean thinking for healthcare
  12. Management of chronic disease with ICT
  13. Meaningful Use
  14. Mobile apps, wearable solutions and sensor technologies
  15. Multi-disciplinary care teams
  16. Nursing informatics
  17. Policy initiatives and changes to healthcare policy
  18. Precision Healthcare
  19. Public health informatics
  20. Service oriented architectures
  21. Six sigma for healthcare
  22. Telemedicine
Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before November 10, 2015, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 26, 2016 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by March 23, 2016. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Handbook of Research on Open Source Solutions for Knowledge Management and Technological Ecosystems. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-blind peer review editorial process.

Proposals and Full chapters may be submitted to this book here.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit http://www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2016.

Important Dates
  • November 10, 2015: Proposal deadline
  • January 26, 2016: Full chapter submission
  • March 23, 2016: Revised chapter submission
Inquiries

Professor Nilmini Wickramasinghe
Epworth Chair Health Information Management
E-mail: Nilmini.work@gmail.com

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