Editorial for the special issue: Health Management

Abstract

Health systems sector confronts major challenges worldwide that arise mainly from its dynamic and rapidly transformable environment. Global characteristics like the current economic crisis, the evolution of new technologies and IT together with demography changes, create new facts which are added to the already existing concerns for the management of health systems. Over the years extensive research from different disciplines has been conducted to issues related to health systems and solutions have been proposed that improve the performance of the systems. O.R. techniques saw sustained growth overtime in providing useful information for the efficient and effective management of health systems. This issue of the journal is dedicated to Health Management and it was arranged on the grounds of the 21st National Congress of the Greek OR Society entitled ‘‘Decision Making in Health Systems’’ held in Athens on May 2009. The special issue contains five papers selected from several submissions. Each submitted paper was peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. The papers addressed are different. The paper by Vozikis et al. applies the theory of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes to patients with Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD) and proposes a method to accelerate value iteration to the therapy of IHD. The results show great promise as an alternative means for determining cost-effective monitoring and treatment policies to patients with IHD. The next paper addresses the issue of productivity in public hospitals. Dimas et al. evaluate the productive performance of a sample of 22 Greek public hospitals over a 3-year period. Malmquist indices and Data Envelopment Analysis are employed to measure and decompose productivity while Tobit multivariate