Advantages of applying information and communication technologies to support complex team practices in healthcare domain have often been supported in the extant literature. The primary assumption is that before putting any technologies in place to support team functions, the team-based environment should be completely modeled. To date, many frameworks have been proposed for modeling healthcare teams; however, most of the frameworks only focus on single or a few aspects of teamwork and the outcomes usually present overlaps, limitations and inconsistencies. As a result, there is an increasing demand for offering an overarching framework that integrates the multiple dimensions of healthcare teamwork into a synthetic whole and clearly conceptualizes the potentially important relationships and dependencies that exist over those dimensions. In order to properly address the aforementioned challenge, this thesis applies ontological engineering to develop an overarching framework for integrating the multiple dimensions of teamwork concept in healthcare domain. For this purpose, we first illustrate a set of four stage methodological approach to provide explicit details on how to incorporate a theatrical foundation into the ontology. Then, the proposed approach is used to develop a derived ontological framework. Finally, accuracy and completeness of the proposed ontology based framework is validated to show that it is able to accurately represent the domain is it being employed for. The values and capabilities of ontology have already been studied and approved, and this technology is known as the best sources to represent a knowledge domain by means of concepts and accurately define the relationships among them. Our aim in this thesis is to further research how to develop and evaluate a standard ontology based framework to facilitate the healthcare team modeling.

This thesis focuses on provincial reactions to the Supreme Court decision on 5 June 2005, Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General). In this decision, the Court struck down the government of Québec’s ban on private insurance for publicly-insured services, on the grounds it violated the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, while the decision on the Canadian Charter ended in a 3:3 tie with one abstention. It is the purpose of this research to examine the reactions of each provincial government to the decision in an attempt to understand why each province responded in its chosen manner. In order to make this determination, four hypotheses were constructed in order to test four separate variables: court interference, current law, ideology, and political calculation. These hypotheses were tested against provincial reactions in the media, legislatures, court documents, and E-mail administered questionnaires. This research finds that each hypothesis had some success in predicting provincial reactions to the decision, with a government’s current law and ideology proving to be the most accurate predictors. Based on the evidence gathered, three conclusions were arrived at: first, a government’s law and its ideology will often predict how a government will behave; second, that governments are open to Supreme Court decisions in the area of health care, and, finally, that if provincial governments were to make the decision to increase the role of the private sector in health care, political leaders would require public opinion be in support of such a decision rather than act solely on an ideological predisposition to greater private sector involvement.

With the continued increases in the global population, a serious problem will occur in relation to an ageing population. The reason for this is that a significant number of elderly people may suffer from serial chronic diseases making it difficult for them to live independently and thus they pose a significant economic burden for both themselves and for their government. In order to solve this problem, more and more E-healthcare applications are being designed. In addition, a wide range of medical sensors exist, which can monitor almost all the important physiological parameters of the human body. However, different sensors may use different communication protocols, data units and formats. Additionally, the elderly may use more than one E-healthcare application at the same time and this can lead to problems if there is more than one data source. The project “A Middleware of Wireless sensor networks for Home healthcare monitoring application” is designed to solve these problems.  The focus of this report is on the design and implementation based on multiple modules of data acquisition. There are four data acquisition modules which include the ZigBee module, 6LowPAN module, Wi-Fi module and a Bluetooth module. Thus, multiple data acquisition module middleware supports the sensor by means of ZigBee, 6LowPAN, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The tasks of the middleware are to collect packets from sensors, perform data processing and mapping and then displaying as real-time data and finally transmitting the data to the remote server.

This thesis focuses on provincial reactions to the Supreme Court decision on 5 June 2005, Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General). In this decision, the Court struck down the government of Québec’s ban on private insurance for publicly-insured services, on the grounds it violated the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, while the decision on the Canadian Charter ended in a 3:3 tie with one abstention. It is the purpose of this research to examine the reactions of each provincial government to the decision in an attempt to understand why each province responded in its chosen manner. In order to make this determination, four hypotheses were constructed in order to test four separate variables: court interference, current law, ideology, and political calculation. These hypotheses were tested against provincial reactions in the media, legislatures, court documents, and E-mail administered questionnaires. This research finds that each hypothesis had some success in predicting provincial reactions to the decision, with a government’s current law and ideology proving to be the most accurate predictors. Based on the evidence gathered, three conclusions were arrived at: first, a government’s law and its ideology will often predict how a government will behave; second, that governments are open to Supreme Court decisions in the area of health care, and, finally, that if provincial governments were to make the decision to increase the role of the private sector in health care, political leaders would require public opinion be in support of such a decision rather than act solely on an ideological predisposition to greater private sector involvement.

There is not sufficient information in the market of medical service. Whether the public has adequate information is the key to the choice of healthcare seeking. Due to the shift of medical environment, rise of consumer¡¦s awareness and respect to patient¡¦s right, the public is concerned about their health and right. Becoming customer-oriented, the industries of medical service start to emphasize the management of customer¡¦s needs and provide appropriate products and service in order to achieve hospital¡¦s sustainable operation and development. This research aims to explore people¡¦s needs of medical seeking from the health news offered by medical institutes and to probe into the influence of health news on choice of medical seeking. Furthermore, the difference of people¡¦s medical seeking behavior of different demographic characteristics and health condition would also be discussed. This research adopts the quantitative survey method of questionnaire to collect data of outpatients in the over 15 age group on a regional hospital in Kaohsiung City. We received 381 valid questionnaires totally and 352 surveys are usable. The valid sample returns-ratio is 92.3%. The results for statistical analysis show that the rank order of demands on issues of news for people¡¦s seeking medical care are listed as follows according to the assisting extent of healthcare provider: ¡§The new trend of health and diseases¡¨, ¡§novel treatments or technique,¡¨ ¡§information of healthcare and hygienic education,¡¨ ¡§introduction of new equipment and facility,¡¨ ¡§medical discovery,¡¨ and ¡§doctor introduction or profession¡¨. The average mean of the required level marks above 4¡§satisfaction¡¨. (The score 5 is the highest.) By excluding other factors, it achieves levels of significance in aspects of health news path and health news issues on explanation of each dimension of people¡¦s medical seeking behavior. Health news shows significant effect on people¡¦s medical seeking behavior. The standardized coefficient is analyzed for further check that health news path and health news issues are positive predictable variables in each dimensions of people¡¦s medical seeking behavior. It implies that for people¡¦s medical seeking behavior, the higher the health news path uses and the higher the demand of health news requires, the stronger the influence on people¡¦s medical seeking behavior. In the discussion of the difference of people¡¦s medical seeking behavior of different demographic characteristics and health condition, it shows that gender, age, level of education, occupation, medical seeking under discomfort, commercial medical insurance, health condition and frequency of medical seeking in recent month would intervene how health news influence people¡¦s medical seeking behavior. By logistic regression analysis, it is found that level of education, coverage on newspapers, hospital handouts, introduction of new equipment and facility and medical discovery are possible predictors of the purpose of medical seeking. On the other hand, easy to choose of healthcare seeking , critical illness, frequency of medical seeking in recent month, coverage on newspapers and medical discovery are possible predictors of the site of medical seeking. In addition, age, level of education, medical seeking under discomfort, health condition, hospital website, community healthcare service and public relationship activity are possible predictors of the frequency of medical seeking. The conclusion of this research could be adopted by the hospital manager and the public relations practitioner for reference as they intend to release health news.

U.S. healthcare costs have experienced unsustainable growth, with expenditures of $2.5 trillion in 2009, and are rising at a rate faster than that of the U.S. economy. A major factor in the cost of the U.S. healthcare system is related to the strategic behavior of system participants based on their incentives. This dissertation addresses the challenge of designing incentives to solve problems in healthcare systems. Principal agent theory and Markov decision processes are the primary methods used to construct incentives. The first problem considered is how to design contracts in order to align consumer and provider incentives with respect to preventive efforts. The model consists of an insurer contracting with two agents, a consumer and a provider, and focuses on the trade off between ex ante moral hazard and insurance. Two classes of efforts on behalf of the provider are studied: those which complement consumer efforts, and those which substitute with consumer efforts. The results show that the provider must be given incentives when the consumer is healthy to induce effort, and that inducing provider effort allows an insurer to save on incentives given to the consumer. The insurer can save on the cost of incentives by using a multilateral contract compared to the bilateral benchmark. These savings are illustrated by an example showing which model features affect the savings achieved. The second problem addresses the decision to provide knowledge to consumers regarding the consequences of health behaviors. The model developed to address this second problem extends the literature on incentives in healthcare systems to consider dynamic environments and includes a behavioral model of healthcare consumers. By using a learning model of consumer behavior, a policy maker's knowledge provision problem is transformed into a Markov decision process. This framework is used to solve for optimal knowledge provision policies regarding behaviors affecting coronary health. Sensitivity analysis shows robust threshold features of optimal policies. The results show that knowledge about smoking should be provided at most health and behavior states. As the cost of providing knowledge increases or aptitude for behavioral change decreases, fewer states are in the optimal knowledge provision policy, with healthy consumers dropping out first. Knowledge about diet and physical activity is provided more selectively due to the to uncertainty in the health benefits, and the time delay in accrued rewards.

This thesis focuses on how to describe how Lean adapts within the healthcare. Lean has become a control system   as more and more companies are using in order to create competition in order to increase the quality and efficiency. This theory has now become implemented in the healthcare. The project has been organized with patients and that has created a flow in the daily work. Our study has used qualitative research strategy where we have started from secondary data presented for hospitals in the Stockholm area and a report written by John Rognes and Anna Svarts “Lean i vården” (2011). To map which hospitals are using Lean. The purpose is to identify how lean production has been implemented into four hospitals in the Stockholm area, to study how the difference are between the hospitals version of Lean compare to the fundamental, Lean production. The study describe that Lean within the healthcare is not so different compared to Lean Production in the industry. But the big different is that Lean within the healthcare is more focused on the patients and their process during the hospital visit. Lean Production is more focused on the production to the final product.

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely adopted by different industries for various purposes. While implementing a RFID system for personnel tracking in an industrial environment, such as a hospital, the tracking accuracy is not always satisfactory due to incorrect placement of RFID hardware, coarse system configuration or environment. This thesis proposes comprehensive optimization methods for improving the tracking accuracy of a RFID system for personnel tracking. The improvement is achieved from four perspectives including RFID data cleaning, experimental design, data fusion and simulation modeling. This research is based on a case study carried out in a local community hospital where a RFID system for personnel tracking has been implemented. Through applying the optimization methods, the tracking accuracy of the RFID system has been improved to 87.33%. The thesis provides a guideline for the hospital and other similar application environment to implement improvement methods on a RFID tracking system.

This research is characterised by its overlap of research from management and healthcare. This research is an attempt to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on the linkages between three multidisciplinary research themes; healthcare management concepts, information and communication technology (ICT) and knowledge management (KM). The objective of this research is to examine the feasibility of incorporating the KM paradigm in healthcare. This research discusses whether it would be beneficial for healthcare institutions (HIs) to adopt the KM paradigm so as to facilitate effective decision-making in the context of healthcare delivery. This research contends that the key to success of healthcare in the twenty first century is an effective integration of technology with the human clinical decision-making process. It is therefore important to develop a conceptual KM health framework that encompasses technological, organisational and managerial perspectives. The research design, guided by a qualitative philosophy, was inductive in nature and used the case study methodology for accomplishing the research objectives. Empirical data was gathered via a main case. The findings from the main case, in conjunction with inputs from the literature review, formed an iterative process. The analysis of the collected data resulted in a first level conceptual KM framework for Healthcare organisations. Data was then gathered from five additional case studies to (1) validate the findings obtained from the main case and (2) to carry out a cross-case analysis. Data was collected from personnel at the five cases by way of structured and semi-structured interviews, observations, archival records, telephone and virtual interviews. The analysis of the data obtained from the five cases lead to a revision of the first conceptual KM framework, resulting in a revised (and final) KM-Healthcare framework, complemented by a user guide which included a structured "walk-through" for Healthcare institutions.