Health Industry Innovation and Healthcare Transformation

Dear Colleagues,

The revolutionary innovations of recent years have led to a significant transformation of the healthcare sector. However, as a result, humankind is facing unprecedented challenges. The abundance of new and very expensive diagnostics and therapies upsets the financial balance of health care systems and forces us to make sensitive decisions for the sake of sustainability. Since the health care budget is limited, we must decide what technology for what social group we can finance from the community/state budget, leading to new social conflicts. New technologies offer many early-phase, non-invasive diagnostics, which lays the foundation for the possibility of recovery for those early-stage patients suffering from a disease previously thought to be incurable. This, in turn, often leads to overdiagnosis, and the burden of unintended side effects in the screening programs often outweighs the results. The medical application of machine learning and artificial intelligence also makes us rethink many things. The decision-making process in data-rich healthcare raises the question of whether the doctor is really the best diagnostician, or if is it advisable to entrust this to the computer. Additionally, increasingly complex models for the digital evaluation of drug candidates are forcing us to reconsider the concept of patient safety with the involvement of regulatory authorities.

In this Special Issue, paper topics should focus on social challenges (not limited to those mentioned above) that technological innovation can address in health care delivery. Different forms of articles (conceptual, empirical, critical) are welcome!

Dr. Norbert Buzás
Guest Editor

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• healthcare innovation
• sustainable healthcare
• social conflicts
• overdiagnosis
• software as a medical device
• data-rich medicine
• solidarity
• ethics