Healthcare: systems biology

Managed healthcare systems also have interests in reductionist definitions of disease. The payment and reimbursement structures of Health Management Organizations (HMOs) require that conditions be identified and coded in terms of a predefined list of syndromes with pre-established measures of cost and risk. Calling for evidence-based medicine , HMOs are more likely to reimburse conditions that are defined as biological because diagnosis appears objective. 

CAN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY FORM THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF A HEALTHCARE SYSTEM ... 

Treatment of psoriasis with new biologies costs in the range of 25,000- 45,000 per year as compared with 2200 for methotrexate and 3000- 5000 per year for phototherapy. The cost of erythropoietin for renal dialysis is 10,000 per year and for cancer patients 1000 per month of treatment. New vaccines are priced in the 200- 400 range. Xigris is priced at 6800 per injection and drug-coated stents at over 3000. The European government-funded healthcare systems and insurance companies try to delay and limit access to costly new medicines and try to negotiate lower prices. 

In order to be accepted officially into the main stream of the healthcare system and for industrial applications, propolis needs chemical standardization that guarantees its quality, safety, efficacy, and provenance. The chemical diversity mainly caused by the botanical origin makes the standardization difficult. Since the chemistry and biological activity of propolis depends on its geographical origin, a ptrojjer method to discriminate its origin is needed (Bankova, 2005). 

Department of Veterans Affairs, Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, Nashville, Tennessee, USA " "Department of Cancer Biology, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA "Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA... 

Department ofVeterans Affairs, Tennessee Valley Healthcare System Department of Cancer Biology, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA... 

Y. T. Zhang, Y. S. Yan, C. C. Y. Poon, Some perspectives on affordable healthcare systems in China, in Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, France, 2007. 

The complex systems analysis of function of systems extends also to social systems. Perhaps it is better to consider that the field of complex systems does not create artificial distinctions between social, engineered, and biological systems. This is important when we consider the functional effectiveness (health) of the healthcare system in the same manner as we consider the functional effectiveness of a biological or engineered system. 

W.-Y. Chung, S.-C. Lee, S.-H. Toh, WSN based mobile u-healthcare system with ECG, blood pressure measurement function, in Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2008. EMBS 2008. 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, 2008, pp. 1533-1536. 

Physiogenomic Contours The Application of Systems Biology for Engineering Personalized Healthcare Andreas Windemuth, Richard L. Seip, and... 

The number of new NIR fluorophores that can be used in biological systems has grown substantially in recent years as a consequence of extensive research efforts to improve the properties of available dyes. A brief overview of the various types of long-wavelength (above 600 nm) fluorophores including phycobiliproteins, BODIPY, and Alexa Fluor dyes (Life Technologies), Cy dyes (GE Healthcare),... 

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