European Health Management in Transition – serie

From precision medicine to pandemics, from value-based healthcare to stakeholder engagement, European health systems are facing unprecedented change. How can health managers cope with these challenges and what skills and competencies will they need to deliver transformational change in the 'new normality'? This original volume presents a blueprint for Health Management 2.0 and helps set a path for long-term health system sustainability.Along with a comparative European framework to illustrate current developments in health management, the authors also highlight five key change drivers: integration; personalization; empowerment; digitalization; and life sciences, and examine how each is enabling the development of health systems that are fundamentally different from those of today.With fresh insights for managers, educators, researchers and policy makers, Health Management 2.0 promotes a modern interdisciplinary and dynamic approach to health leadership and management - one that focuses on skills and competencies - and outlines international best practice for future teaching and training.

Since February 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has strained health systems worldwide. Despite several measures adopted, including the deployment of emergency funds to sustain health service transformations and investment in vaccine development, the crisis has taken over a year to be controlled. The consequences are still affecting the capacity and capabilities of health systems.In light of the ongoing pandemic, this book explores the factors determining the ability of health systems to cope with and recover from a crisis, and therefore their level of resilience. The term resilience has gained momentum in health systems research, with several scholars contributing to the definition of the concept. Providing a comprehensive health system resilience agenda, policy-makers, public health specialists, health managers, scholars and practitioners will find in this work both a grounded framework for the assessment of the level of resilience of healthcare systems and organizations, and specific actionable changes that should be pursued to consolidate and improve that level of resilience.Ultimately, this work identifies desirable paths of action through the investigation of real-world cases to improve health systems and organizations capacity and capability to face any future dramatic crisis.

Healthcare systems across the globe are currently facing perhaps the greatest challenges and pressures to date as the need to improve outcomes, efficiency, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and sustainability have significantly risen. Further, the emerging focus on value-based healthcare has increased performance expectations. To improve capability to face these challenges, doctors were “transformed” by health organizations and systems into more hybrid figures, i.e., doctor-managers and most recently clinical leaders. Yet, in many cases their engagement hasn’t worked as expected or desired, and there is still much ambiguity on what is the set of expectations attached to the new hybrid role.Providing a systematic review of previous literature about the progressively worrying challenge in transforming doctors to clinical leaders, Lega and Pirino offer a qualitative analysis of different advanced countries facing the issue of training this hybrid role. Finding improved practices applicable elsewhere, they conclude with a case study focus on the Italian system.Developing and Engaging Clinical Leaders in the “New Normal” of Hospitals suggests specific policy and practice recommendations on how the system should evolve with regards to clinical leadership.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to drastically change healthcare, including the optimisation of time and materials for clinical tasks (efficiency), and more accurate diagnose detection (effectiveness). However, these clinical-based AI applications are still in very early development stages.Investigating the wide range of applications of AI in both community and hospital care settings, and along the patient care pathway, the chapters here focus on applications capable of contributing to the workflow and management of the activities to be provided. The impact of AI in solving the main issues of modern medicine is discussed, such as reorganization of services towards patient-centricity, management of task shifting and skills mix, greater competitiveness between public and private sector, and financing mechanisms. Difficulties that may arise during the implementation of AI in an organization are addressed, including practical solutions, providing a practical guide for managers, clinical leaders and policy makers.Artificial Intelligence: Why and How it is Revolutionizing Healthcare Management identifies a roadmap for the appropriate introduction of artificial intelligence in healthcare organizations that responds to the need of decision-makers and managers to have a clear picture of how to move in the developing field of AI.

Research shows that low health literacy (HL) is linked to poorer mental and physical health, increased health inequalities and less cost-effective health care systems. HL results in Europe indicate that almost 50% of the respondents in eight member states of the European Union displayed limited HL. Reasons for this range from demographic to socioeconomic, health-related and economic relationships that need to be explored to understand why policymakers and health care managers should care about health literacy.Building and Improving Health Literacy in the 'New Normal' of Health Care explores how health literacy is assessed and measured, both systematically in scientific studies as well as "ad hoc" by medical professionals. The latter shapes how medical staff interacts with patients and therefore is a crucial aspect of patients' understanding. Exemplary data of health literacy results are explained, with a focus on where to obtain health information and how it is communicated, leading on to a discussion exploring how innovations can remedy these potential problems.Building and Improving Health Literacy in the 'New Normal' of Health Care identifies desirable paths of action to improve health literacy amongst patients, focusing on new technologies that could facilitate reducing health disparities. It is an essential read for policymakers and health care managers.