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Optimising E-health System for Sustainable Healthcare

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Health, Well-Being and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 11833

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Electronic Engineering and Communications, University of Zaragoza, Teruel 44003, Spain
Interests: Telerehabilitation technologies and systems; m-health; e-health integrated systems; virtual-reality-based rehabilitation; virtual/augmented reality for e-health; smart devices for hospital/residence facilities

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are currently running a Special Issue entitled “Optimising E-Health Systems for Sustainable Healthcare” in the open-access journal Sustainability (IF 2.576, 2071-1050). The submission deadline is 31 May 2021, and papers may be submitted immediately or at any point until the deadline, as papers will be published on an ongoing basis.

Nowadays, e-health is a global tool accessible to the majority of people. The application of information and communication technologies in health systems represents benefits in terms of innovation in the social and health field and in the economy of any country. The application of technology to health offers the possibility of integrating processes, improving efficiency in the use of time and resources, and thereby reducing costs, leading to an increase in the productivity of healthcare systems. Likewise, the new services created make it possible to overcome geographical and temporal limitations in terms of waiting times and access to health professionals. The collaborative part is also reinforced through the exchange of knowledge among professionals, such as new techniques or treatments, images of patients, and clinical cases.

In this sense, tools based on mobile devices (m-health) play a fundamental role, facilitating the development of applications to aid diagnosis, the application of treatments, as well as the management of healthcare. The interaction between healthcare providers and patients increases feedback in rehabilitation processes, empowering patients in their self-care.

The objective of the current Special Issue is to gather outstanding studies dealing with the integration of technology in healthcare systems with the aim of making them much more sustainable. Therefore, we welcome both original research and review articles in the field of healthcare with sustainable purposes by using the most cutting-edge technologies. We search for practical applications for solving narrowed problem scopes and theoretical procedural approaches to solve a wide range of issues. For this Special Issue, we also welcome solutions in the fields of efficient algorithms, communication among different technologies and software applications, artificial intelligence applications, cloud/edge computing, and, in general, all the technologies aimed at improving the sustainability of healthcare systems.

This Special Issue will supplement the existing literature by providing a series of cutting-edge works with an emphasis on the sustainability of healthcare systems.

Dr. Guillermo Palacios-Navarro
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • telerehabilitation technologies and systems
  • telemedicine
  • m-health
  • e-health integrated systems
  • virtual-reality-based rehabilitation
  • virtual/augmented reality for e-health
  • m-health in developing countries
  • efficient systems for e-health
  • use of standards for integrated e-health management
  • IoT devices for healthcare
  • smart devices for hospital/residence facilities
  • advanced learning systems for e-health

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 492 KiB  
Article
Contracts to Coordinate Healthcare Providers in the Telemedicine Referral System
by Xianyi Wang, Xiaofang Wang and Hui He
Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10299; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810299 - 15 Sep 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2354
Abstract
With the help of telemedicine, healthcare providers can increase patients’ access to high-quality services while reducing the medical expenditure, especially for patients in remote areas. Once advanced care is needed, local patients will first be referred to an online health service and then [...] Read more.
With the help of telemedicine, healthcare providers can increase patients’ access to high-quality services while reducing the medical expenditure, especially for patients in remote areas. Once advanced care is needed, local patients will first be referred to an online health service and then be referred to the offline hospital if the online healthcare fails. In practice, local community hospitals and the advanced tertiary hospitals generally lack financial incentives to exert costly, but non-reimbursable, effort to avoid poor patient outcomes. Therefore, we build a new model to analyze the interaction between these two service providers, promoting them to exert the right effort by designing payment contracts. Our results show that neither fee-for-service nor bundled payment contracts can achieve the social optimum. Tertiary hospitals always exert less effort than the socially-optimal effort while the community hospital may exert less or more effort depending on the online treatment cost. Then, we propose a performance-based bundled payment contract that can coordinate both hospitals’ decisions to achieve socially optimal outcomes. Finally, we numerically show the impact of the referral service fee and the online treatment cost on the efficiency of these contracts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optimising E-health System for Sustainable Healthcare)
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15 pages, 2834 KiB  
Article
Sustainable Virtual Reality Patient Rehabilitation Systems with IoT Sensors Using Virtual Smart Cities
by Moustafa M. Nasralla
Sustainability 2021, 13(9), 4716; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13094716 - 23 Apr 2021
Cited by 30 | Viewed by 3229
Abstract
To develop sustainable rehabilitation systems, these should consider common problems on IoT devices such as low battery, connection issues and hardware damages. These should be able to rapidly detect any kind of problem incorporating the capacity of warning users about failures without interrupting [...] Read more.
To develop sustainable rehabilitation systems, these should consider common problems on IoT devices such as low battery, connection issues and hardware damages. These should be able to rapidly detect any kind of problem incorporating the capacity of warning users about failures without interrupting rehabilitation services. A novel methodology is presented to guide the design and development of sustainable rehabilitation systems focusing on communication and networking among IoT devices in rehabilitation systems with virtual smart cities by using time series analysis for identifying malfunctioning IoT devices. This work is illustrated in a realistic rehabilitation simulation scenario in a virtual smart city using machine learning on time series for identifying and anticipating failures for supporting sustainability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optimising E-health System for Sustainable Healthcare)
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23 pages, 8215 KiB  
Article
A Virtual Reality-Based Cognitive Telerehabilitation System for Use in the COVID-19 Pandemic
by José Varela-Aldás, Jorge Buele, Pedro Ramos Lorente, Iván García-Magariño and Guillermo Palacios-Navarro
Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 2183; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13042183 - 18 Feb 2021
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5184
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s lives and the way in which certain services are provided. Such changes are not uncommon in healthcare services and they will have to adapt to the new situation by increasing the number of services remotely offered. Limited [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s lives and the way in which certain services are provided. Such changes are not uncommon in healthcare services and they will have to adapt to the new situation by increasing the number of services remotely offered. Limited mobility has resulted in interruption of treatments that traditionally have been administered through face-to-face modalities, especially those related to cognitive impairments. In this telerehabilitation approach, both the patient and the specialist physician enter a virtual reality (VR) environment where they can interact in real time through avatars. A spaced retrieval (SR) task is implemented in the system to analyze cognitive performance. An experimental group (n = 20) performed the SR task in telerehabilitation mode, whereas a control group (n = 20) performed the SR task through a traditional face-to-face mode. The obtained results showed that it is possible to carry out cognitive rehabilitation processes through a telerehabilitation modality in conjunction with VR. The cost-effectiveness of the system will also contribute to making healthcare systems more efficient, overcoming both geographical and temporal limitations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optimising E-health System for Sustainable Healthcare)
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