New Perspectives for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment. Will We Be Able to Ensure Equity to Care?

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Editorial: New Frontiers for Artificial Intelligence in Surgical Decision Making and its Organizational Impacts

The purpose of the research topic call “New Frontiers for Artificial Intelligence in Surgical Decision Making and its Organizational Impacts “ was to collect the recent developments and undergoing studies in AI in surgery and surgical oncology. More in detail, the aim was to gather contributions on the advancement, deployment, use, and implementation of AI-based applications in surgical practice, understanding their potential contribution to clinical decision making. Moreover, the idea was to assess the potential impacts of such a technology on surgeons, other clinicians, patients, medical institutions, developers, and policy-makers, with an eye open to the organizational and educational consequences and opportunities

One size does not fit all - Translating knowledge to bridge the gaps to diversity and inclusion of surgical teams

Diverse teams have proven their ability to reach superior performance and improve patients' outcomes. Nevertheless, differences in race, gender, age, nationality, skills, education, and experience act as powerful barriers to diversity and inclusion, which negatively impacts multiple healthcare organizations and limit the potential outcome of diverse teams. Knowledge Translation (KT) can help to bridge the gaps among all the various individuals involved, whether they be members of the surgical team or surgical patients

To a New Normal: Surgery and COVID-19 During the Transition Phase

Surgeons and surgery departments have shown resilience in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the situation stabilizes, it will be necessary to adopt new strategies to move into the transition phase and eventually the full recovery phase

Knowledge in transition in healthcare

Organizations are challenged by the need to transform Dynamic Knowledge, embedded in each worker, into Static Knowledge, rooted in factual documental information. However, innovation and knowledge creation seem to be facilitated by the personal knowledge and life experiences of people, which appear to be dynamic. The tensions between Dynamic and Static Knowledge in facilitating the transfer and sharing of knowledge arise as compelling research as well as practical topic for organizations. Our paper aims to investigate such tensions by employing a case study. We decided to deepen such dynamics in the healthcare field, given its importance for business and society. In more detail, we analyzed one Emergency Room (ER) department through a series of interviews. Our findings highlight the importance of the right balance between Static and Dynamic Knowledge. On the one hand, the healthcare organization recognized the need to incorporate knowledge into practical and tangible instruments. On the other hand, the flows of Dynamic Knowledge must be fostered through a culture of knowledge translation and sharing, and the development of soft skills

Co-design, co-learning, and co-production of an app for pancreatic cancer patients—the “Pancreas Plus” study protocol

Background: Pancreatic cancer is a malignant and complex tumor that often leads to an adverse prognosis. Patients need to face a challenging treatment path, which involves highly-specialized multidisciplinary professionals. The complexity of the disease requires the development of dedicated tools to support patients in their care journey. Co-production stands as a valuable strategy in oncological care to engage patients in understanding their care journey and behaving accordingly to get the best possible clinical outcome. Methods: The non-profit association Unipancreas, active in promoting the latest advances in pancreatic cancer care and in supporting pancreatic cancer patients, has partnered with a multidisciplinary group of professionals to conceive the brand new program “Pancreas Plus” to employ a co-design, co-learning, and co-production path to design an app devoted to pancreatic cancer patients to assist them during their treatment and follow-up journey. The app, which is the outcome of a multi-stakeholder engagement project, offers health information and medical advice specifically tailored on the pancreatic cancer disease. The article reports the research protocol, which may be replicated for the design of other e-health tools focusing on different conditions. Discussion: The study’s output will be an app that sees the pancreatic cancer patient as the main beneficiary but which can gather and address the interests and needs of all meaningful stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers, healthcare and educational institutions, and

Why non-technical skills matter in surgery. New paradigms for surgical leaders

The surgical literature is paying more and more attention to the topic of soft or non-technical skills (NTS), defined as those cognitive and social skills that characterize high-performing individuals and teams. NTS are essential in supporting surgeons in dealing with unexpected situations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NTS have been considered crucial in defining situation awareness, enhancing decision making, communicating among groups and teams, and fostering leadership. With a “looking back and planning forward” approach, the current perspective aims at deepening the contribution of NTS for surgeons to deal with the unexpected challenges posed by the COVID crisis, surgical emergencies, the introduction of new technologies in clinical practice, to understand how such skills may help shape the surgical leaders of the future

Knowledge translation in the healthcare sector. a structured literature review

Knowledge translation can be understood as the ability to translate concepts between different contexts by stakeholders who have different skills, aims, and even feelings in their relation to such concepts. Knowledge translation tools allow for the effective transfer of existing knowledge as well as the emergence of new knowledge of value to some or all of the stakeholders involved in the process. Knowledge translation is particularly challenging in healthcare and medicine, where different practitioners (e.g. physicians, biologists, engineers, researchers) and professionals need methodologies and tools to communicate and share knowledge among them and with patients in an effective manner. To better understand this phenomenon, we conducted a Structured Literature Review (SLR). The concepts knowledge, translation and either healthcare or medicine were used as search terms in the title, abstract or keywords on Scopus, which highlighted more than 2,000 contributions in the medical literature and only 22 in Business and Management. Our review of these documents revealed a need in the healthcare sector for better managerial and organisational practices to cope with the various challenges related to the sharing of knowledge among stakeholders. At the same time, the business and management communities appear to have made significant progress in addressing the same issues. We therefore decided to concentrate our analysis on the works published by the business and management community as a mean to highlight future research directions for the healthcare management sector. Thus, our research identifies areas of relevance which are currently underdeveloped, provides insights on both theoretical and empirical developments and offers a critique of the approaches, research frameworks and methods used, as well as emerging trends in these domains. Despite a lack of an agreed definition of the term Knowledge Translation, our findings highlight a growing interest in the topic, with most of the contributions published after 2015. Scholars have approached the term from a variety of perspectives depending on the nature of the stakeholders of relevance to their studies. Whilst there does not seem to be a predominant framework, the literature reveals several tools and techniques that are effective in enhancing Knowledge Translation in different contexts. New research opportunities in this domain emerge in terms of underinvestigated areas within the healthcare sector

Doctor@Home: Through a Telemedicine Co-production and Co-learning Journey

Telemedicine and remote visits are becoming more and more popular in several medical disciplines, including oncology. The Covid-19 pandemic has enhanced the need to continue to meet patients’ ambulatory care necessities ensuring social distancing and limiting the access to clinical facilities. The National Cancer Institute of Aviano, Italy, has recently launched a program called “Doctor @ Home” (D@H). The pillars of the program are the co-production of the oncological care and the co-learning approach, which sees the clinical staff “hand in hand” with patients to maximize the outcome of the care, trying to take advantage of the new tools offered by modern technologies

The potential of AI in health higher education to increase the students’ learning outcomes

The main goal of this article is to understand the potential learning applications based on AI technologies for health higher education students. We employed a Systematic Literature Review, contributing to explore to what extent AI technologies are currently influencing the Health learning processes in higher education and the skills developed during the learning path. The intent is to contribute to a more profound understanding of learning contexts, methodologies, technologies, and pedagogical processes with the application of AI technologies. The literature emphasizes that AI can be used to potentiate the learning process and the learning outcomes, especially in laboratory classes, and such contexts are still largely unstudied. To fulfil this gap, some practical applications based on AI technologies applied to health higher education studies were identified, highlighting AI's innovations and possible opportunities for health higher education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio