Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Sustainability focuses on a fundamental topic in today’s society, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic: the sustainability of healthcare systems. The pandemic highlighted the weaknesses of the health system, subjecting it to harsh stress tests. In the global health crisis, the older population and chronic patients have been the focus of the attention of health systems as they are high-risk groups, highlighting the need to improve the structures and protocols aimed at the most vulnerable. Health and care systems have been working under pressure during these last few months, significantly affecting their effectiveness and efficacy. All these aspects must act as a red flag to point out the value of healthcare systems to approach citizens’ wellbeing and to protect this crucial aspect for the current and future sustainability of Welfare States.  

Demographic change, with the aging of societies, and epidemiological change, with an increase in chronic diseases, is unquestionable globally. Among the consequences of these changes is the increase in multimorbidity and fragility, which means an increase in demand for health and social services. This scenario involves complexity in the management and organization of care, which require a structural and functional adaptation of the available health resources if we want to conserve them and make them sustainable. However, the effects of decision making in the medium- and long-term in health systems pose a great challenge without the help of technology, that is, without the use of computational tools and mathematical models. This is not a new challenge—scientists from different areas of knowledge have questioned the feasibility and sustainability of health systems for several decades. In this context, it is important to highlight the link between social and technical sciences for the advancement and implementation of current knowledge in this field.

Today’s global health crisis, derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, forces us to consider what is necessary to renew our systems and maintain them, without conditioning the response of future societies. In this Special Issue, we hope to find papers that raise responses to the challenge of sustainability of healthcare, in particular those aimed at the most vulnerable populations, such as older patients and/or those with chronic diseases, from different approaches. We are particularly interested, from an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional point of view, in the use of AI and algorithms in the field of care management, computational simulation of new care scenarios, the proposal of models to improve care for patients with chronic diseases, the development of tools for early identification, risk detection and screening, or the organization and integration of palliative care in daily clinical practice as well as end-of-life care.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Ródenas Rigla
Prof. Dr. Jordi Garcés Ferrer
Dr. Ascensión Doñate-Martínez
Guest Editors

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• sustainable healthcare
• long-term care
• chronic diseases
• older population
• ICT applied to healthcare