Medical technology enjoys a love-hate relationship with the public. On the one hand, it is praised for saving lives and improving health outcomes, but on the other, it is widely blamed for the continuing rise in healthcare costs.
Healthcare reforms attempt to address this issue by establishing better incentives for providers. However, the increasing demands on resources will force hard choices.
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Advancements
When a new medical study is published, healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients now have instant access to the data via digital media platforms that support discussion and content-sharing. For example, a publication with a longstanding reputation has expanded its presence on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to allow HCPs and their patients to receive updates about research findings in almost real-time.
Academic publishers like Bentham Science play a crucial role in disseminating research, which offers various scholarly journals covering multiple fields, contributing significantly to the global academic community.
Medical treatment has made astonishing advances over the years, but the packaging and delivery of that care often need to be more efficient, effective, and user-friendly. Consumer-focused innovations that aim to improve the patient experience and deliver better value to the healthcare system can run into barriers, such as hostile industry players and powerful community-based providers who see any change as a threat to their power and influence. Consumer-focused ventures that are not well developed and lack adequate distribution channels can also get stymied by tight regulation.
Delivery
The global healthcare system is complex, involving many players with different roles and responsibilities. In addition to financing health services through taxes and private enterprise, it also provides care for people with a wide range of health needs. Moreover, the system is evolving to become more value-based. Several models are being developed that aim to shift from fee-for-service (FFS) payments for the quantity of services to those that incentivize quality and cost-effectiveness.
It is charting new territory through its purpose to identify the highest impact innovations, ideas, and measures to transform healthcare delivery. It provides authoritative content for healthcare leaders, practitioners, and researchers.
Open-access publishing has become increasingly popular, with platforms like Bentham Open providing a wealth of freely accessible scholarly articles across multiple disciplines, fostering a more inclusive dissemination of knowledge.
This journal is an open-access publication, making all articles free to read and download. It follows a fast publishing schedule while maintaining rigorous peer review. Manuscripts are submitted online, and the journal publishes all accepted papers in fully browsable web form and formatted PDF.
Patient Care
Medical publications drive healthcare advances while influencing how doctors practice and evaluate research. The global burden of chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer has increased the need for published evidence in clinical care and triggered greater collaboration among researchers.
As a result, medical publications have shifted from print to digital distribution and emphasized article-level metrics over traditional impact measures, such as academic citations. These shifts have impacted the industry’s profitability and led to higher prices for authors.
The public should be a significant voice in the debate over open access to medical publications, as they are the funders of academic research and the beneficiaries of its results. They should also be vested in having medical research widely available because it will allow them to make informed health-related decisions and advocate for policies that improve their quality of life. The public should have the right to access medical research because it was made possible by their time and effort as study participants.
Research
The public directly or indirectly funds a substantial portion of medical research and, as such, has a strong interest in disseminating new academic knowledge. Indeed, many government funders now require that research results be publicly available, some even mandating open-access publishing.
While some medical journals have accelerated their publication processes during the COVID-19 pandemic, others have not — with turnaround times similar to those before the pandemic. This discrepancy suggests that accelerating the publication of coronavirus-related articles may have come at the expense of other content due to page budget constraints or a shift in submission volumes.
Moreover, medical journals should consider increasing transparency about their relationships with pharmaceutical companies, which can influence the study design and conclusions reached by authors. They also need to do a better job of identifying and managing conflicts of interest. Until recently, most medical journals didn’t ask authors about their financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and didn’t manage these conflicts well enough.