Home monitoring in Portugal: an overview on current experiences

This paper aims to be a contribution to the discussion on the issue of innovation in healthcare since, in the author’s perspective, the health sector, and particularly the Portuguese National Health Service, needs changes in its "business model". There is a need of redirecting care provision to the citizen’s natural environment, namely considering the opportunities offered by information and communication technologies. For this purpose the authors surveyed projects already implemented in Portugal, within the Portuguese National Health Service, related to home monitoring, in order to make a critical analysis of the state of the art of ongoing projects. In this study, the authors identified four pilot experiences of home monitoring, all targeted at chronic disease. In spite of some results of these experiments are already known, there is a shortage of available information and scientific evidence, both about the implementation processes themselves and about their clinical, technical an d economic evaluation, which, in the opinion of the authors, also hinders their assessment and dissemination.publishe

Implementation Action Plan for organic food and farming research

The Implementation Action Plan completes TP Organics’ trilogy of key documents of the Research Vision to 2025 (Niggli et al 2008) and the Strategic Research Agenda (Schmid et al 2009). The Implementation Action Plan addresses important areas for a successful implementation of the Strategic Research Agenda. It explores the strength of Europe’s organic sector on the world stage with about one quarter of the world’s organic agricultural land in 2008 and accounting for more than half of the global organic market. The aims and objectives of organic farming reflect a broad range of societal demands on the multiple roles of agriculture and food production of not only producing commodities but also ecosystem services. These are important for Europe’s economic success, the resilience of its farms and prosperity in its rural areas. The organic sector is a leading market for quality and authenticity: values at the heart of European food culture. Innovation is important across the EU economy, and no less so within the organic sector. The Implementation Action Plan devotes its third chapter to considering how innovation can be stimulated through organic food and farming research and, crucially, translated into changes in business and agricultural practice. TP Organics argues for a broad understanding of innovation that includes technology, know-how and social/organisational innovations. Accordingly, innovation can involve different actors throughout the food sector. Many examples illustrate innovations in the organic sector includign and beyond technology. The various restrictions imposed by organic standards have driven change and turned organic farms and food businesses into creative living laboratories for smart and green innovations and the sector will continue to generate new examples. The research topics proposed by TP Organics in the Strategic Research Agenda can drive innovation in areas as wide ranging as production practices for crops, technologies for livestock, food processing, quality management, on-farm renewable energy or insights into the effects of consumption of organic products on disease and wellbeing and life style of citizens. Importantly, many approaches developed within the sector are relevant and useful beyond the specific sector. The fourth chapter addresses knowledge management in organic agriculture, focusing on the further development of participatory research methods. Participatory (or trans-disciplinary) models recognise the worth and importance of different forms of knowledge and reduced boundaries between the generators and the users of knowledge, while respecting and benefitting from transparent division of tasks. The emphasis on joint creation and exchange of knowledge makes them valuable as part of a knowledge management toolkit as they have the capacity to enhance the translation of research outcomes into practical changes and lead to real-world progress. The Implementation Action Plan argues for the wider application of participatory methods in publicly-funded research and also proposes some criteria for evaluating participatory research, such as the involvement and satisfaction of stakeholders as well as real improvements in sustainability and delivery of public goods/services. European agriculture faces specific challenges but at the same time Europe has a unique potential for the development of agro-ecology based solutions that must be supported through well focused research. TP Organics believes that the most effective approaches in agriculture and food research will be systems-based, multi- and trans-disciplinary, and that in the development of research priorities, the interconnections between biodiversity, dietary diversity, functional diversity and health must be taken into account. Chapter five of the action plan identifies six themes which could be used to organise research and innovation activities in agriculture under Europe’s 8th Framework Programme on Research Cooperation: • Eco-functional intensification – A new area of agricultural research which aims to harness beneficial activities of the ecosystem to increase productivity in agriculture. • The economics of high output / low input farming Developing reliable economic and environmental assessments of new recycling, renewable-based and efficiency-boosting technologies for agriculture. • Health care schemes for livestock Shifting from therapeutics to livestock health care schemes based on good husbandry and disease prevention. • Resilience and “sustainagility” Dealing with a more rapidly changing environment by focusing on ‘adaptive capacity’ to help build resilience of farmers, farms and production methods. • From farm diversity to food diversity and health and wellbeing of citizens Building on existing initiatives to reconnect consumers and producers, use a ‘whole food chain’ approach to improve availability of natural and authentic foods. • Creating centres of innovation in farming communities A network of centres in Europe applying and developing trans-disciplinary and participatory scientific approaches to support innovation among farmers and SMEs and improving research capacities across Europe

East Midlands healthcare and bioscience sector strategy

The healthcare and bioscience sector is one of four priority sectors identified in the regional economic strategy, A Flourishing Region. This document sets out a strategy for maximising the contribution of the healthcare and biosciences sector to the economic development of the East Midlands

Managing the Ethical Dimensions of Brain-Computer Interfaces in eHealth: An SDLC-based Approach

A growing range of brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies is being employed for purposes of therapy and human augmentation. While much thought has been given to the ethical implications of such technologies at the ‘macro’ level of social policy and ‘micro’ level of individual users, little attention has been given to the unique ethical issues that arise during the process of incorporating BCIs into eHealth ecosystems. In this text a conceptual framework is developed that enables the operators of eHealth ecosystems to manage the ethical components of such processes in a more comprehensive and systematic way than has previously been possible. The framework’s first axis defines five ethical dimensions that must be successfully addressed by eHealth ecosystems: 1) beneficence; 2) consent; 3) privacy; 4) equity; and 5) liability. The second axis describes five stages of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) process whereby new technology is incorporated into an eHealth ecosystem: 1) analysis and planning; 2) design, development, and acquisition; 3) integration and activation; 4) operation and maintenance; and 5) disposal. Known ethical issues relating to the deployment of BCIs are mapped onto this matrix in order to demonstrate how it can be employed by the managers of eHealth ecosystems as a tool for fulfilling ethical requirements established by regulatory standards or stakeholders’ expectations. Beyond its immediate application in the case of BCIs, we suggest that this framework may also be utilized beneficially when incorporating other innovative forms of information and communications technology (ICT) into eHealth ecosystems

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Dialectics of Efficient Change Management in the Regional Social Systems

The research has placed emphasis on the role of the social infrastructure sectors, providing social services, which facilitate human potential development in a modern state. Theoretical positions of the scientist considering the nature of social benefits and necessity of the government support for the social sphere has been summarized in the article. The state of the Russian social infrastructure sectors has been considered and the analysis of their performance compared to these of the social infrastructure sectors in other countries has been conducted in the research work. Taking into consideration the performance ratings of the effectiveness of the national education systems, the countries around the world concerning the effectiveness of the health system, the countries around the world concerning the social development level in 2014, the authors have proposed the conceptual approach that makes it possible to consider the correlation and interrelation of the level of the government financing of the social sphere and the dynamics of the contribution of social infrastructure sectors in the development of the human capital, ensuring the gross domestic product increase. The necessity of making innovative changes in the socio-economic systems of the social infrastructure sectors, to improve their performance, taking into account the results obtained, in the first place, in health care, has been wellgrounded and theoretical approaches to the changes management in the socio-economic systems has been studied in the article. The theoretical approaches to the changes management in the socio-economic systems have been studied by the authors. Based on the conducted studies and the formed theoretical basis for improving the level of changes management in open socio-economic systems, for the purpose of development of the theoretical and methodological approaches to changes management as applied to health care sphere, optimization model of management of health care organizations by way of ranking of manageable and unmanageable changes has been proposed. The possibility of using management optimization by way of ranking of manageable and unmanageable changes in the health care management at different levels has been confirmed with high-performance indicators at the micro-, meso- and macro levels in the sector, by the example of implementation of the national project “Health” and innovative organizational changes facilitating the return to work of patients of the working age, which are involved in the gross domestic product formation in the city of Yekaterinburg.The article has been prepared with the support of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 14-18-00456 “Support of geoecosocioeconomic approach to development of strategic nature resources capacity of the low-studied northern territories within the investment project “Arctic — Central Asia”