PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic is considered a major disruptive event of this decade, raising unforeseen socio-economic implications worldwide. This novel virus has increased the influx of patients in ...hospitals, and healthcare organisations are facing unprecedented constraints in their operations to deal with increased demand and pressed capacity. Thus, this article evaluates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare systems' demand, resources and capacity and provides research directions.Design/methodology/approachThis is a viewpoint article and uses timely information on healthcare operations from both scholars and managers, published by diverse sources during the COVID-19 outbreak.FindingsThe authors discuss the focus on “flattening the curve of infection” as a measure to protect healthcare, delay the impact of increased demand and reorientate healthcare supply chain practices. Furthermore, the authors evaluate the role of lean practices on managing demand and capacity and improving quality across healthcare operations and supply chain. Finally, the authors suggest research directions on modern operational issues that emerged during this pandemic, such as discussions around the sustainability of lean post-pandemic, “just in time” practices, inventory trade-offs and lack of organisational responsiveness during untenable events.Originality/valueIn this article, the authors provide a contemporary assessment of the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare operations, underscoring main economic and operational elements that can be affected, such as unforeseen demand, resources and capacity shortage. Therefore, the authors assess that healthcare organisations, practitioners and governments have to anticipate operational and economic impacts and, ultimately, to reassess their plans to deal with such adverse events.
•In this paper, we cryptanalyze Liu-Chung’s, and Challa et al.’s authentication and access control protocol for WSNs.•We proposed an enhanced authentication and access control protocol for WSNs.•The ...proposed scheme is formally validated using AVISPA tool and BAN logic model.•Our informal security analysis showed that, the proposed scheme is secure.•The proposed scheme is efficient compared to other competitive and related protocol.
Wireless Healthcare Sensor Network (WHSN) has become one of the major research fields over the past decades that play a very prominent role in the medical field. Due to the rapid growth of technology in wireless communication, different security challenges have been raised in WHSN. Authentication protocols are used to secure the information transferred over the public channels by WHSN. For this prospect recently, Liu & Chung proposed an authentication and data transmission mechanism for WHSN. However, Challa et al. identified that Liu-Chung’s scheme is vulnerable to stolen smart-card, offline password guessing, privileged insider, and user impersonation attacks. Challa et al. then proposed an enhanced scheme to overcome beforehand stated flaws. This paper denotes out that in accession to before mentioned attacks, Liu-Chung’s scheme is also prone to users’ private key leakage and user impersonation attacks towards sensors. Moreover, Challa et al.’s scheme suffers from incorrectness, broadcasting problem, lack of authentication between Trusted Authority (TA) and sensor nodes, replay attack, Denial of Service (DoS) attack, forgery attack and delay in communication due to the involvement of the TA. Using the elliptic curve cryptography and bilinear paring, an improved scheme is proposed in this paper, to mitigate the weaknesses of Challah et al. and Liu-Chang schemes. The formal security analysis using simulation tool AVISPA and BAN logic demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure. The rigorous informal security analysis also attests that our scheme is safe against well-known attacks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative technology with billions of sensors in various IoT applications. Important elements used in the IoT are sensors that collect data for desired analyses. ...The IoT and sensors are very important in smart cities, smart agriculture, smart education, healthcare systems, and other applications. The healthcare system uses the IoT to meet global health challenges, and the newest example is COVID-19. Demand has increased during COVID-19 for healthcare to reach patients remotely and digitally at their homes. The IoT properly monitors patients using an interconnected network to overcome the issues of healthcare services. The aim of this paper is to discuss different applications, technologies, and challenges related to the healthcare system. Different databases were searched using keywords in Google Scholar, Elsevier, PubMed, ACM, ResearchGate, Scopus, Springer, etc. This paper discusses, highlights, and identifies the applications of IoT healthcare systems to provide research directions to healthcare, academia, and researchers to overcome healthcare system challenges. Hence, the IoT can be beneficial by providing better treatments using the healthcare system efficiently. In this paper, the integration of the IoT with smart technologies not only improves computation, but will also allow the IoT to be pervasive, profitable, and available anytime and anywhere. Finally, some future directions and challenges are discussed, along with useful suggestions that can assist the IoT healthcare system during COVID-19 and in a severe pandemic.
Abstract
Objective: The article is devoted to the analysis of sociological information about the attitude of students to their health.
Methods: A sociological survey among students of Kazan ...educational institutions of Higher Education was conducted in September-November 2020.
Results: The study showed low knowledge of students about the main medical indicators of health, the absence of a healthy lifestyle in the system of value orientations, and lack of confidence in the healthcare system.
Conclusion: The study results on low knowledge of health indicators suggests that it is necessary to conduct competent educational work on the dissemination of medical knowledge among young people, to examine students more carefully in the course of medical examination, to improve the availability and quality of health services provided to students.
There exists a rising concern on security of healthcare data and service. Even small lost, stolen, displaced, hacked, or communicated in personal health data could bring huge damage to patients. ...Therefore, we propose a novel content-aware deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) computing system to encrypt medical images, thus guaranteeing privacy and promoting secure healthcare environment. The proposed system consists of sender and receiver to perform tasks of encryption and decryption, respectively, where both contain the same structure design, but perform opposite operations. In either sender or receiver, we design a randomly DNA encoding and a content-aware permutation and diffusion module. Considering introducing random mechanism to increase difficulty of cracking, the former module builds a random encryption rule selector in DNA encoding process by randomly mapping quantity of medical image pixels to outputs. Meanwhile, the latter module constructs a permutation sequence, which not only encodes information of pixel values, but also involves redundant correlation between adjacent pixels located in a patch. Such design brings awareness property of medical image content to greatly increase complexity in cracking by embedding semantical information for encryption. We demonstrate that the proposed system successfully improve cybersecurity of medical images against various attacks in robustness and effectiveness when transmitting data in wireless broadcasting scenarios.
Background
Previous studies have shown that minorities and immigrants have low levels of trust in healthcare systems (HCSys), which might present a barrier in access to and utilization of healthcare ...services. We compared the levels of trust in Israel’s HCSys among the Arab minority, immigrant Jews, and non-immigrant Jew sand draw on the integrative model of organizational trust to explore factors that can explain differences in the trust level within and between the study groups.
Method
We obtained cross-sectional census data from the 2017 Social Survey of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. We studied levels of trust based on a survey question: “Do you have trust in the HCSys?” We used logistic regression models to compare levels of trust in HCSys among the study groups, adjusting for components of the integrative model: characteristics (sex, age, education, religiosity, and healthcare service use), abilities (private health insurance ownership), integrity (discrimination, trusting the justice system and government), and perceived risk (self-reported health).
Results
Our findings revealed that Arabs (odds ratio (OR) = 4.20, 95% confidence intervals (CI) = 4.17, 4.23) and immigrant Jews (OR = 2.54, 95% CI = 2.51, 2.58) had more trust in the HCSys compared to non-immigrant Jews, even after adjusting for all the component variables. Different components of the integrative model explained trust in each population group.
Conclusion
Minority and immigrant groups had greater trust in the HCSys compared to the non-immigrant group. These findings may indicate different expectations with respect to patient–caregiver relations and HCSys utilization and raise questions regarding access to HCS and quality of care among minority and immigrant groups.
Despite the growing interest in transformational performance improvement among nearly all countries, international benchmarking has rarely been used. Cross-comparative research could allow an ...appreciation of the extent of Lean's use in healthcare and a better evaluation of possible cultural influences on Lean implementation. This study provides a comparative international benchmarking of Lean adoption, implementation, and outcomes of hospitals in the US and Italy.
The National Survey of Lean, developed in 2017 in the US and adapted in Italy in 2019 was used to compare the two healthcare systems along three dimensions: the maturity of adoption, the implementation approach, identifying both strategic and operational activities and tools, and the Lean performance, investigated through patients, employed, and affiliated staff, costs, and service provision areas. Descriptive statistics including T-tests were used to examine differences between the two countries on the study variables.
Lean has been adopted less by Italian public hospitals (36%) than US public hospitals (53%). Each country averages 4 years of experience with Lean. Italian hospitals reported being at a higher maturity stage while the US implemented a more system-wide approach, developing Lean in more operational units. The daily management system, leadership commitment, education and training indexes were higher or the same in the US while in Italy, hospitals had a higher self-reported performance index.
This exploratory work is one of the first international benchmarking studies on Lean implementation in healthcare systems using a standardized survey with a common set of definitions and questions. The study identifies different forms of Lean implementation that can be adopted, both at strategic and operational levels, with related perceived outcomes. Despite the US public hospitals being more likely to report a higher number of units using Lean, a higher daily management system index and use of Lean tools, Italian hospitals report more achievements primarily due to Lean. Further research can build on these findings by examining the relationship between Lean adoption/implementation and independent, objective performance measures.
The Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium (TCMHCC) includes all twelve Health-Related Institutions (HRI) in the State of Texas. At each HRI, teams of child health faculty and staff are reviewing ...needs of children in Texas and providing new primary care interventions for children (eg, CPAN, TCHATT, CPWE). In addition to the clinical care programs, two research registries (for Trauma and Depression) have been developed to inform future care pathways with new data. The registries collect similar kinds of descriptive, medical and psychosocial data reliably. Because advances have suggested that events and experiences in early years could be the origins of adult mental health challenges, these research registries could contribute to the development and application of treatments during youth to mitigate both youth and adult manifestations of associated mental health vulnerabilities. These registries are set up and the members are reliably gathering baseline data throughout the state, which was the initial goal. The registries now include treatments, Trauma-CBT for Trauma and Behavioral Activation for Depression, to test for efficacy and specificity. We look forward to testing and comparing additional treatments in the future studies.
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