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Comparative full economic evaluations are needed to evaluate whether telehealth-based systems can bring societal cost savings and economic benefits that exceed economic costs. However, economic evaluations of telehealth-based interventions across different health care fields have focused primarily on cost analysis, rather than on full economic analysis, which captures both the economic costs and economic benefits of two or more competing interventions. The authors provide a framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis that would render this method more applied. In particular, they are interested in the comparative economic evaluation of two categories of Autism Spectrum Disorders intervention programs: telehealth-based and in-person. Their framework can be used to economically evaluate whether telehealth service delivery offers greater societal net benefits—the difference between societal economic benefits and societal economic costs—than in-person delivery, and the threshold volume of telehealth encounters required for the telehealth delivery to reach a zero societal net benefit.

We review case studies of stakeholder participation in the environmental cleanup of radioactive wastes in the United States, Japan and United Kingdom (e.g., [21,26,27,66,78]). Citizen participation programs in these three countries are at different stages: mature in the US, starting in Japan, and becoming operational in the UK. The US issue at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina (SC) had been focused on citizens encouraging Federal (DOE; US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA; and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC) and State (SC’s Department of Health and Environmental Compliance, or DHEC) agencies to pursue “Plug-in-RODs” at SRS to simplify the regulations to accelerate closing seepage basins at SRS. In Japan, the Reprocessing of spent fuel and deep geological disposal of vitrified high-level waste have been among Japan’s priorities. A reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture is expected to commence operations in October 2010. The search of a site for a deep geological disposal facility has been ongoing since 2002. But the direct engagement of stakeholders has not occurred in Japan. Indirectly, stakeholders attempt to exert influence on decision-making with social movements, local elections, and litigation. In the UK, the issue is gaining effective citizen participation with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). We hope that the case studies from these countries may improve citizen participation.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become distinguished from Information Technology in that ICT extends specifically beyond technology to its use with critical organizational skills, the skills across a market segment, or across a system of organizations. In this chapter, the authors begin to apply social interdependence theory to their interest in the technologies and techniques that increase both knowledge and social welfare (e.g., ICT), in particular the application of metrics to organizational performance. In this chapter, they address ICT in our research as it is applied to Telemedicine, eHealth, and e-Institutional Review Boards (eIRBs) for healthcare in Georgia.

Traditional social science models, including those for social network analysis (SNA), have so far not succeeded in establishing a valid computational model of social science, especially autonomy. A wide-ranging call has been issued to develop a fundamental replacement for traditional science in order to be able to mathematically control organizations and systems composed of humans, machines, and robots that can work together effectively to solve problems that organizations and systems composed of humans now solve intuitively. We report our progress with the development of a fundamental control theory based on social network analysis.