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INTRODUCTION: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) refers to a group of therapeutic and diagnostic disciplines that largely exist outside the institutions where conventional health care is taught and provided. In most parts of the world CAM content is included into health care professionals training programs. In Croatia there are still ideological and professional disputes between the majority of allopathic establishment and CAM practitioners. AIM: Aim of the study was to identify the openness and willingness of healthcare workers for organized undergraduate and/or lifelong education in the field of CAM for the purpose of better and easier integration of CAM into the education and health system of the Republic of Croatia. SAMPLE AND METHODS: The study was conducted on a sample of 569 participants (173 nurses, 312 physiotherapists and 84 sanitary engineers enrolled into study programs during the academic year 2017/2018. RESULTS: Only 22.8% participants confirmed that during their previous education in the field of health care through verified curricula they met topics from CAM. The majority of them – 61.7%, would like to acquire sufficient knowledge through formal education programs so that the interested patient could be properly talked about the possibilities of application and effectiveness of CAM. On the same line are 56.9% of participants who have expressed positive attitudes about incorporating CAM into the curricula. As nursing and physiotherapy are regulated professions in the EU member states it is logical that 71% of the participants support the idea that CAM therapists should pass a licensing system as healthcare workers of classical medicine do. CONCLUSION: This survey gives a contribution to understanding the attitudes and beliefs about CAM among health care professionals in Croatia. The obtained attitudes about CAM have shown that health care professionals perceived that they had very little knowledge of complementary and alternative medicine but are completely open-minded about the integration of CAM education into the training programs for health care professionals in Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology innovations are predicted to drive the greatest evolutionary progress in human history, accelerating the emergence of new technology innovations and affecting the way we humans live and act. In this situation, it is important to address how we can use these technologies and service innovations enabling the beneficial impacts, possibly by exceeding the human performance levels. Despite of the importance of the AI innovations and their impact in healthcare, there is still only little advance research about long-term effects on healthcare practitioners. This paper provides a literature review looking at the AI impacts to the healthcare experts. In the paper it is shown, that the field is lacking empirical evidence, but there is an indication of positive impact through communication enhancement between physician and patient, but also possibilities for clinical and cognitive skills deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background - Rapid development of interdisciplinary academic connections highlights the importance of written communication. The necessity of the latest data sharing, on the one hand, the scientific achievements promoting, on the other hand, make an ability of health care professionals to written speech activity salient. Materials and Methods - The study is aimed at professional written speech activity of health care professionals. Quantative and statistical methods were used. The progress of respondents was being evaluated during two terms. The authors suggest developing skills in written speech activity by means of gradual compression of articles selected from medical journals as one of the efficient techniques. In this paper, writing is considered as independent form of speech activity. Results - After two terms of teaching health care professionals to write a summary they significantly improved their ability for compressing medical texts. Conclusion - written speech activity develops the process of recoding and thoughts expression from a native language into a foreign one. By learning to write a summary, health-care professionals acquire the skills necessary to perform specific operations of altering original texts such as: compression, transformation, paraphrasing. Teaching to summary writing helps to understand the structure of various text types that may come across in professional communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of culture has been popular topic in recent information system research. However, it is not a simple task to neither collect nor analyze data containing elements of "culture". This paper presents previous literature on how to measure culture, the theoretical background how to build this construct and a short description of empirical study we conducted in a multicultural environment. Our research topic was to examine the usage of health information exchange systems in two different kinds of healthcare sectors (i.e. Finland and USA). Finally we reflect our experiences both in collecting data as well as in analyzing it through the lenses of cultural differences. Strengths and weaknesses of multicultural data collection are discussed together with opportunities and threats of analyzing data with the purpose of finding cultural elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways to restrain health care sector costs are several and especially the role of IT has been widely discussed. The benefits expected from IT include cost savings, improved care quality and patient safety. As the opinion of end user is often considered essential for IT adoption and use, the health care professionals are in crucial role when collecting data on health care information systems performance. During a project concentrating on health care professionals' needs of patient-specific data, and current and future roles of information systems, three different data collections were organised and conducted. This paper concentrates on the experiences from those three data collections, studying barriers and issues that had positive effect on the process. The data collections included interviews, an Internet discussion board and a survey. The interviews were found to be the most effective way of data collection because of the possibility to explain the research theme thoroughly. The interviewees did not feel very familiar with the theme though it was closely related to their daily routines. Therefore there were not many voluntary participants but the interviews still provided useful information. A more innovative data collection on a closed Internet discussion board provided some interesting and useful answers but did not attract many participants, possibly because the participants are not used to this type of data collections. Preparations of the survey took over a year and the process is still unfinished. The major problems related to it are the field-specific terminology and the delayed schedule of the partner organisation. Conducting cross-scientific data collections has been challenging but the health care professionals' attitude to researchers from other field has been mainly positive despite the fact that they come from a field with established quantitative data collection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]