For many people in both developing and developed countries universal healthcare is still not the norm. Socio-economic status and geographical restrictions have proved to be major barriers to accessible care. The use of information and communication technologies ICT is growing rapidly internationally as the need to provide more efficient and cost-effective care becomes increasingly urgent. Improving the health of a nation begins with the individual and recent developments in genomics and mobile networked information technologies have regenerated interest in individualizing healthcare. Harnessing the diversity and ubiquity of

As the population ages and healthcare costs continue to soar, the focus of the nation and the healthcare industry turns to reducing costs and making the delivery process more efficient. Demonstrating how improvements in information systems can lead to improved patient care, Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare explains how to cr

Adequate healthcare access not only requires the availability of comprehensive healthcare facilities but also affordability and knowledge of the availability of these services. As an extended responsibility, healthcare providers can create mechanisms to facilitate subjective decision-making in accessing the right kind of healthcare services as well various options to support financial needs to bear healthcare-related expenses while seeking health and fulfilling the healthcare needs of the population. This volume brings together experiences and opinions from global leaders to develop affordable, sustainable, and uniformly available options to access healthcare services.

The digitization of healthcare has become almost ubiquitous in recent years, spreading from healthcare organizations into the homes and personal appliances of practically every citizen. Thanks to the collective efforts of health professionals, patients and care providers as well as systems developers and researchers, the entire population of Europe is able to participate in and enjoy the benefits of digitized health information. This book presents the proceedings of the 26th Medical Informatics in Europe Conference (MIE2015), held in Madrid, Spain, in May 2015. The conference brings together participants who share their latest achievements in biomedical and health Informatics, including the role of the user in digital healthcare, and provides a forum for discussion of the inherent challenges to design and adequately deploy ICT tools, the assessment of health IT interventions, the training of users and the exploitation of available information and knowledge to further the continuous and ubiquitous availability and interoperability of medical information systems. Contributions address methodologies and applications, success stories and lessons learned as well as an overview of on-going projects and directions for the future. The book will be of interest to all those involved in the development, delivery and consumption of health and care information.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is used in healthcare and health science research in application domains such as clinical trials and the development of drug and medical devices, as well as in translational medicine, with the aim of improving prevention, diagnosis, and interventions in health and care. This book presents accepted papers from the 2019 European Federation of Medical Informatics conference (EFMI STC 2019), held in Hanover, Germany, from 7 – 10 April 2019. More than 90 submissions were received, from which, after review, the Scientific Program Committee (SPC) accepted 50 full papers to be included in this volume of proceedings. In addition, 16 poster presentations were accepted. This year, ICT for Health Science Research was selected as the focus topic, and the conference also honors Prof. Peter Leo Reichertz (1930 – 1987), one of the founding fathers of ICT healthcare and an originator of the term Medical Informatics. The conference focuses on recent research & development supporting information systems in biomedical, translational and clinical research, as well as semantic interoperability across such systems for the purpose of data sharing and the analytics of cross-system integrated data. Papers are divided into 12 categories covering topics including digitization; data privacy; interoperability; data-driven decision support; mobile data capture; and ICT for clinical trials. The book will be of interest to all healthcare researchers and practitioners whose work involves the use of ICT.

Databases; Software development; Computer programming; Business applications; Computer networking and communications; Operating systems; Telecommunications; Communications engineering.

This book uncovers stakes and possibilities offered by Computational Intelligence and Predictive Analytics to Medical Science. The main focus is on data technologies,classification, analysis and mining, information retrieval, and in the algorithms needed to elaborate the informations. A section with use cases and applications follows the two main parts of the book, respectively dedicated to the foundations and techniques of the discipline.

This book explains how telemedicine can offer solutions capable of improving the care and survival rates of cancer patients and can also help patients to live a normal life in spite of their condition. Different fields of application – community, hospital and home based – are examined, and detailed attention is paid to the use of tele-oncology in rural/extreme rural settings and in developing countries. The impact of new technologies and the opportunities afforded by the social web are both discussed. The concluding chapters consider eLearning in relation to cancer care and assess the scope for education to improve prevention. No medical condition can shatter people’s lives as cancer does today and the need to develop strategies to reduce the disease burden and improve quality of life is paramount. Readers will find this new volume in Springer’s TELe Health series to be a rich source of information on the important contribution that can be made by telemedicine in achieving these goals.

Ensuring patient safety and providing high-quality health services are the dominant challenges faced by healthcare systems around the world today. The sharing of advanced knowledge and best practice in diagnosis, therapy, process optimization and prevention are essential to achieve this goal; this includes enhanced networking socially and technologically as well as the inclusion of public health and social sciences. This book contains the proceedings of the 13th European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Special Topic Conference (STC), held in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2013. The EFMI STC 2013 is Europe’s leading forum for presenting the results of current scientific work in health informatics processes, systems and technologies this year. The title of this 13th conference is Data and Knowledge for Medical Decision Support, and the conference addresses this important field, linking traditional and translational medicine with natural sciences and technology with a view to the design, implementation and deployment of intelligent systems which will meet the expectations of developers and users such as health professionals and patients. Within this context, the authors included here address the important issues of knowledge representation and management, appropriate terminologies and ontologies, the development of reasoning engines, and the modeling and simulation of real systems for decision making. The hot topics of "Big Data" and "Analytics" also receive attention.

In addition to social media’s prevalence for personal use, online networking tools are also gaining momentum in the healthcare field. Health information and patient discussion are embracing these technologies to create a more ubiquitous communication platform. Social Media and Mobile Technologies for Healthcare provides insight on the tools that are integral to understanding and implementing emerging technologies in health-related fields. With an ever-growing presence of patients and health professionals on social networking sites, this book will provide insight into the effect of communication technologies on health services. This publication is useful for professionals and researchers in health informatics, as well as students, practitioners, clinicians, and academics.