Preface

The production of healthcare services had been out of the business, organizational, and tech‐ nological dynamics that continually revolutionized the production of all other goods and services for a long time. Nowadays, this marginality has ceased as the need for healthcare is rising. Healthcare is now at the center of attention influenced by the never-ending demand of medical technology and substantial resource scarcity that imposes substantial organiza‐ tional and entrepreneurial innovations. One decisive challenge that has emerged from such a situation is the management of healthcare processes, in the broad sense: healthcare profes‐ sionals are called upon to demonstrate their ability to cope with complex problems because they are characterized in an institutional, ethical, organizational, and economic sense.

The book makes it possible to realize the specific nature of the problem. Its multidimension‐ ality and the original approach are contributed and harmonized by scholars belonging to different disciplines.

This book contains eight chapters in a single segment (*Health Management*), which, through‐ out the author's different approaches to the subject, help us to understand the issues of the health sector.

Chapter 1 "Low-Cost Health/Medical Tourism of Italians" addresses the theme of the socalled medical tourism or health tourism. The authors try to show how travel for touristic reasons can be matched to travel for reasons of health or well-being.

Chapter 2 "The Future Population of the Industrialized Countries" is devoted to the problem of the inexorable decline of the more developed countries with respect to the population. Aging is reaching intolerable levels on economy, both from the active point of view (availa‐ ble workers) and the passive point of view (e.g., health costs, pensions), redesigning a wor‐ rying scenario for the near future.

Chapter 3 "Extending Health Information System Evaluation with an Importance‐Perform‐ ance Map Analysis" shows how the evaluation of a health information system is a necessary task for the determination of the effective use of the system and how it enhances the produc‐ tivity of medical practitioners. The chapter also provides a valuable recommendation for the policy and decision-makers at the managerial level on how to apply the proposed system evaluation method of a health information system in producing more efficient strategic planning for further system upgrades and new implementation at health facilities.

Chapter 4 "European Health System Typologies: Last 30 Years Under Review" is devoted to the classification of national health systems into homogeneous groups. The last 30 years are divided into two periods (1985–2000 and 2000–2015) in order to present and briefly describe most influential national health system typologies.

In Chapter 5 "Assessment of Avoidable Mortality Concepts in the European Union Coun‐ tries, Their Benefits and Limitations," the authors compare the impact of four lists of causes of death on the age-standardized amenable death rates across the European Union countries in 2014 by using statistical methods. They conclude that the structure of diseases and the age limits influence the value of standardized amenable death rates and hence it is useful to de‐ velop the concept of amenable mortality at the national level in the light of actual availabili‐ ty of medical skills and effective treatments in the country.

In Chapter 6 "The Efficiency of Post‐Communist Countries' Health Systems," the authors demonstrate the study of the health systems in 28 post-communist countries of the former Eastern bloc in order to determine the efficiency of the analyzed systems. The used method is the so-called method of data envelopment analysis (DEA). Recommendations are formu‐ lated, and projections are presented for the inefficient countries, that is, those countries that were in the Soviet sphere of influence after the Second World War, so that they can achieve such health results as in the case of the most developed European countries.

Chapter 7 "Health Support in the Palm of Your Hand: The Role of Technology in Achieving Health Goals" reviews how Smartphone apps and social network sites are being used by individuals who want to take care of their health, finding suggestions for the individuals who are using digital technologies in order to improve their well-being. It also shows how specific social marketing campaigns can be designed to influence healthcare behavior for particular individuals, including health promotion and interventions to help individuals achieve personal goals and improve the quality of their life.

In Chapter 8 "Universal Health Coverage and Environmental Health: An Investigation in Decreasing Communicable and Chronic Disease by Including Environmental Health in UHC," the authors demonstrate how by implementing country-specific universal healthcare (UHC) approaches, focusing on sufficient government spending on healthcare (including training healthcare professionals) and engaging public-private partnerships to successfully target environmental health at the community level, universal healthcare can be achieved.

> **Ubaldo Comite** Department of Business and Law University "Giustino Fortunato" Benevento, Italy
