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The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it analyzes demand and supply-side factors that influence patient flows to and from Austria. Second, building on the empirical research and existing conceptualizations, the study offers a general extended framework to guide future comparative analysis.

The paper draws on multiple data sources including a literature review, secondary data, website analysis and semi-structured interviews with patients and health providers. Content analysis was carried out to identify common motives for seeking care abroad and providers' orientation towards medical travel.

Outbound medical travel is largely determined by factors of access, affordability and vicinity, while inbound medical travel is predominately driven by a lack of adequate medical infrastructure in source countries and quality, both in terms of medical and service quality. Providers distinguish themselves according to the extent they take part in medical travel.

The findings emerging from a single country case study approach cannot be generalized across settings and contexts, albeit contributing to a better understanding of current medical travel patterns in Europe.

Unlike most recent contributions, this study focuses both on inbound and outbound medical travel in Austria and investigates patient flows for distinctive treatments and drivers. While analysis of the supply-side of medical travel is often limited to tourism studies, this study provides a critical insight into developments in Europe from a health policy perspective, acknowledging that diverse medical travel patterns in Europe coexist.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the health sector reform toward 2040 of Japan as a super-aged society.

This paper discusses the current healthcare policies adopted in Japan and projects the challenges in future as a super-aged society.

Through Japanese experiences, it is considered that Community-based Integrated Care System is useful, which takes into account the perspective of health care users. Being a super-aged society, it is essential for Japan to have more consensus by further removing obstacles, and paying attention to the change of paradigm and the purpose of care.

Based on the case of Japan, this paper serves as a reference for other East Asian countries, which would sooner or later encounter the similar situation of becoming super-aged societies in the 21^st century.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of the challenges and implications entailed by deploying mobile clinics in conflict zones to reach populations affected by violence and cut off from health-care services.

This research combines an integrated literature review and an instrumental case study. The literature review comprises two targeted reviews to provide insights: one on conflict zones and one on mobile clinics. The case study describes the process and challenges faced throughout a mobile clinic deployment during and after the Iraq War. The data was gathered using mixed methods over a two-year period (2017–2018).

Armed conflicts directly impact the populations’ health and access to health care. Mobile clinic deployments are often used and recommended to provide health-care access to vulnerable populations cut off from health-care services. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature documenting decision support tools for mobile clinic deployments.

This study highlights the gaps in the literature and provides direction for future research to support the development of valuable insights and decision support tools for practitioners.

Under the Directive 2011/24/EU, medical tourism and cross-border health are interrelated terms regarding the freedom to move to get the most accessible medical treatment into EU Member State within the defined procedures for reimbursement. Little known empirically regarding the efficiency of the cross-border health/medical tourism industry. This study aims to measure its efficiency in Europe for the years 2010-2014, by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).

Data obtained from OECD and the European Core Health Indicators (ECHI), which is collecting the data through Eurostat. Eurostat collects data on health-care activities and provides data on hospital discharges, including the hospital discharges of non-residents and these include hospital discharges of in-patients and day care patients. The analysis uses “DEA.P, 2.1 for windows” by Coelli (1996).

The results show that the Members States health systems were very efficient in handling non-residents in-patients; however, when managing day cases/outpatients, the efficiency scores dropped.

The findings would have significant associations affecting intentions to revisit clinics and the destination country. In addition, will be useful to those seeking a better understanding of the cross-border health and medical tourism industry efficiency.

Extending the findings of the European Commission report (2015c) by examining how well medical tourists are informed about the decision they are making, would be of perceived value. These are important indicators at European level by helping each Member State to measure its medical tourism services.

This paper aims to describe the evolution of Sanokondu, highlighting the rationale, achievements and lessons learnt from this initiative. Sanokondu is a multinational community of practice dedicated to fostering health-care leadership education worldwide. This platform for health-care leadership education was conceived in 2014 at the first Toronto International Summit on Leadership Education for Physicians (TISLEP) and evolved into a formal network of collaborators in 2016.

This paper is a case study of a multinational collaboration of health-care leaders, educators, learners and other stakeholders. It describes Sanokondu’s development and contribution to global health-care leadership education. One of the major strategies has been establishing partnerships with other educational organizations involved in clinical leadership and health systems improvement.

A major flagship of Sanokondu has been its annual TISLEP meetings, which brings various health-care leaders, educators, learners and patients together. The meetings provide opportunities for dialog and knowledge exchange on leadership education. The work of Sanokondu has resulted in an open access knowledge bank for health-care leadership education, which in addition to the individual expertise of its members, is readily available for consultation. Sanokondu continues to contribute to scholarship in health-care leadership through ongoing research, education and dissemination in the scholarly literature.

Sanokondu embodies the achievements of a multinational collaboration of health-care stakeholders invested in leadership education. The interactions culminating from this platform have resulted in new insights, innovative ideas and best practices on health-care leadership education.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate among concerned professionals its certain operational aspects, including some possible implications on health and medical care practices.

It is written on the basis of the author’s special study of a diverse source of information, as well as on author’s practical experience and observation in this particular area.

Special attention is paid to possible public health impacts within a broad social and economic framework, as well as to its impacts on the existing national health care systems in countries, that would possibly lead to certain degree of inequity in health at national level as an important consequence of health development progress.

Knowledge and understanding gained from this paper might be useful in the efforts to develop and manage national health care systems to ensure a reasonable balance in health status of people of all groups.

This article analyzes the cognitive microfoundations, conflicting institutional logics and professional hybridization in a case characterized by conflict.

In contrast to the majority of earlier studies focusing on special health care, the study was conducted in a Finnish basic health care organization. The empirical data include 36 interviews, accounting reports, budgets, newspaper articles and meeting notes collected 2013–2018.

The use of accounting techniques in this case did not offer professionals sufficient support under conditions of conflict. The authors suggest that this perceived lack of support intensified the negative emotions toward accounting techniques. These negative emotions aggregated into incompatible professional-level institutional logics, which contributed to the lack of hybridization between such logics. The authors highlight the importance of the cognitive microfoundations, that is, the individual-level interpretations and emotional responses, in the analysis of conflicting institutional logics.

Managerial attention needs to be directed to accounting practices perceived as frustrating or threatening, a perception that can prevent the use of accounting techniques in the creation of professional hybrids. The Finnish basic health care context involves inconsistent political decision-making, multiple tasks, three institutional logics and individual interpretations and emotions in various decision-making situations.

This study develops microfoundational accounting research by illustrating how individual-level cognitive microfoundations such as dissatisfaction with budgeting, aggregate into professional-level institutional logics, and in our case, prevent professional hybridization in a basic health care setting characterized by conflict and three separate institutional logics.

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the challenges that need to be addressed to accelerate the deployment and adoption of smart health technologies for ubiquitous healthcare access. The paper also explores how internet of things (IoT) and big data technologies can be combined with smart health to provide better healthcare solutions.

The authors reviewed the literature to identify the challenges which have slowed down the deployment and adoption of smart health.

The authors discussed how IoT and big data technologies can be integrated with smart health to address some of the challenges to improve health-care availability, access and costs.

The results of this paper will help health-care designers, professionals and researchers design better health-care information systems.

When reviewing Community Health Development, it is necessary to understand the community context, including community health and details of medical pluralism (MP). The purpose of this paper is to correlate and predict between community health and related factors and delineate phenomenon of MP in Thammasen, Ratchaburi province, Thailand.

A mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was applied in this research. The quantitative survey was conducted by using an interview questionnaire. The 400 respondents were selected by simple random sampling from 11 villages. For the qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 37 key informants from selected health professionals, folk healers and local leaders.

The respondents were 56.5 percent female with a mean age of 53.8 years. The factors relating to community health included: health care behaviors, perceived health status, attitudes toward health care and access to health services. Considering the four predictive variables as a group revealed a 26.2 percent variation in community health. The phenomenon of MP was covered by the following three main aspects: self-health care (SHC)—healthy people pay attention to self-care and used herbal remedies to reduce early symptoms; folk medicine (FM)—some folk healers provide holistic healing, use herbal remedies and transfer knowledge to people who are interested and professional medicine (PM)—some health professionals adopt the concept of integrated medicines such as recommending that patients practice SHC and promote the use of Thai traditional medicine (TTM) and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Health professionals, folk healers and local leaders should provide effective action domains that focus on the following four factors of community health: effective health care behavior, concern for health status, positive attitudes toward health care and accessibility to health services. Regarding MP, integrated medical and health care models should be developed to link SHC, FM and PM (including TTM/CAM).