Integrating management of physician groups and hospitals.
This chapter discusses the management challenges facing hospitals as they enter into formal organizational and economic linkages with physician organizations. Managing physician organizations does not simply mean controlling physicians through employment arrangements, but rather providing an organizational structure through which physicians can work together and with the hospital toward a common goal of creating a high-quality, cost-effective system of patient care. Integration of the management approaches required to run hospitals and physician groups successfully represents a significant challenge. Meeting this challenge is key to creating an organization that will be able to truly manage care.
In this work we present a decision support system for the melanoma diagnosis using individual methods and the collaboration between these methods. The system designed uses a photograph of the lesion and it makes a preprocessing task to extract the region of interest. Then, several characteristics of the image are analyzed, studying with different methods the degree of malignity; the methods used are based in Bayesian rules and in neural networks. Finally, each individual decision from each method contributes in some way to the final decision. The classification rate obtained with the cooperative approach is above 92%.