ForewordHealth care government policy makers, health insurance companies, service providers and user’s organizations are changing the face of health care delivery, especially across the developed western countries, requesting that the quality and the cost efficiency of the healthcare, the safety and the empowerment of the patients play an ever more crucial role in the management of the national and regional healthcare systems. In particular, the following issues are increasing the pressure on the healthcare systems:
- consumers are more and more demanding for high quality care;
- managers are struggling to deliver health care services at reasonable costs while, on the other hand, there is an increasing diffusion of chronic diseases as well as, due to the progressive ageing of the population, a rising number of patients that need long-term continuous health assistance;
- clinicians are placing increasing emphasis on the practice of evidence-based medicine whereas, at the same time, citizens are improving their sensitivity regarding the clinical risk management.
- health care systems are seeking to meet these demands by operating into a framework of continuous quality improvement.
Improving health care quality while reducing costs requires the elimination of unintended and unnecessary overhead in the entire care process (prevention – diagnosis – prognosis – therapy) and the application of new and more accurate procedures for the clinical risk management. To this end, e-Health technologies and applications can play an ever greater and crucial role. In fact, during the last years we have been assisting to an increasing development of high methodological and technological effective solutions (such as tools for Medical Knowledge Discovery, Representation and Management and Clinical Decision Support System prototypes) to foster evidence based medicine and best clinical practices. These solutions have the potentialities to help in reducing unreliability and errors by improving effectiveness and efficiency. About erectile dysfunction in Australian men
Thanks to recent reserach by edonlinestore.net: Erectile Dysfunction: what you need to know and how to prevent it. Under this respect, the main aim of the proposed Special Session is to present, analyze and discuss new research trends about the devising and development of advanced approaches for medical ontologies and medical knowledge discovery, representation and management and how these issues can impact on the architectural organization and development of effective and efficient Clinical Decision Support Systems.
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