Health Care Provision

This book sheds light on various ethical challenges military and humanitarian health care personnel (HCP) face while working in adverse conditions. Contexts of armed conflict, hybrid wars or other forms of violence short of war, as well as natural disasters, all have in common that ordinary circumstances can no longer be taken for granted. Hence, the provision of health care has to adapt, for example, to a different level of risk, to scarce resources, or uncommon approaches due to external incentives or requirements. This affects the practice of health care as well as its ethics. This book offers a panoramic overview on various challenges healthcare faces in extraordinary situations and provides new insights from practitioners’ as well as from academic scholars’ perspectives.

Practitioners are increasingly adopting a personalised medicine approach to individually tailored patient care, especially disease diagnosis and treatment with the use of biomarkers. However, development and implementation of such approaches to chronic disease prevention need further investigation and concerted efforts for proper use in healthcare systems.

The practice of modern medicine and biomedical research requires sophisticated information technologies with which to manage patient information, plan diagnostic procedures, interpret laboratory results, and carry out investigations. Biomedical Informatics provides both a conceptual framework and a practical inspiration for this swiftly emerging scientific discipline at the intersection of computer science, decision science, information science, cognitive science, and biomedicine. Now revised and in its third edition, this text meets the growing demand by practitioners, researchers, and students for a comprehensive introduction to key topics in the field. Authored by leaders in medical informatics and extensively tested in their courses, the chapters in this volume constitute an effective textbook for students of medical informatics and its areas of application.