This eleventh biennial OECD Communications Outlook examines recent developments in the communications sector, which has emerged from the global financial crisis (GFC) with a resilience and underlying strength reflecting its critical role in today’s economies.

Published every two years, the OECD Communications Outlook provides an extensive range of indicators for the development of different communications networks and compares performance indicators such as revenue, investment, employment and prices for service throughout the OECD area.

Implementing safety practices in healthcare saves lives and improves the quality of care: it is therefore vital to apply good clinical practices, such as the WHO surgical checklist, to adopt the most appropriate measures for the prevention of assistance-related risks, and to identify the potential ones using tools such as reporting & learning systems. The culture of safety in the care environment and of human factors influencing it should be developed from the beginning of medical studies and in the first years of professional practice, in order to have the maximum impact on clinicians' and nurses' behavior. Medical errors tend to vary with the level of proficiency and experience, and this must be taken into account in adverse events prevention. Human factors assume a decisive importance in resilient organizations, and an understanding of risk control and containment is fundamental for all medical and surgical specialties. This open access book offers recommendations and examples of how to improve patient safety by changing practices, introducing organizational and technological innovations, and creating effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable care systems, in order to spread the quality and patient safety culture among the new generation of healthcare professionals, and is intended for residents and young professionals in different clinical specialties.

Telemedicine, the practice of transferring medical data using interactive audio, visual and data communication systems, is fast becoming indispensable in modern medicine, healthcare and education. This volume reviews the rapidly expanding and changing field of telemedicine in general with a special focus on teledermatology. As well as presenting historical and technological aspects, the book also describes several of the many fields of application in detail - one of them being teleteaching which already forms an essential part of medical training. Another major issue in telemedicine is the discussion of legal and ethical aspects of teleconsulting. Further contributions acquaint the reader with the various possibilities of telemedicine such as telemedicine for the family doctor, teleradiology, applications in surgery, telepathology, telecardiology, telemedicine in oncology and ophthalmology, and telepsychiatry. The particular aspects of teledermatology are discussed in detail in a separate section. All healthcare professionals from the medical practitioner to the pharmacist, healthcare manager, nurse or technician will find this compilation of up-to-date data valuable reading. The detailed discussion of teledermatology makes it indispensable for the dermatologist.

This report helps policy makers better understand the issues and challenges around geographic variations in health care provision and considers the policy options.

The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. As the Web becomes ever more enmeshed with our daily lives, there is a growing desire for direct access to raw data not currently available on the Web or bound up in hypertext documents. Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data. In this Synthesis lecture we provide readers with a detailed technical introduction to Linked Data. We begin by outlining the basic principles of Linked Data, including coverage of relevant aspects of Web architecture. The remainder of the text is based around two main themes - the publication and consumption of Linked Data. Drawing on a practical Linked Data scenario, we provide guidance and best practices on: architectural approaches to publishing Linked Data; choosing URIs and vocabularies to identify and describe resources; deciding what data to return in a description of a resource on the Web; methods and frameworks for automated linking of data sets; and testing and debugging approaches for Linked Data deployments. We give an overview of existing Linked Data applications and then examine the architectures that are used to consume Linked Data from the Web, alongside existing tools and frameworks that enable these. Readers can expect to gain a rich technical understanding of Linked Data fundamentals, as the basis for application development, research or further study. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Introduction / Principles of Linked Data / The Web of Data / Linked Data Design Considerations / Recipes for Publishing Linked Data / Consuming Linked Data / Summary and Outlook