The latest developments in data, informatics and technology continue to enable health professionals and informaticians to improve healthcare for the benefit of patients everywhere. This book presents full papers from ICIMTH 2019, the 17th International Conference on Informatics, Management and Technology in Healthcare, held in Athens, Greece from 5 to 7 July 2019. Of the 150 submissions received, 95 were selected for presentation at the conference following review and are included here. The conference focused on increasing and improving knowledge of healthcare applications spanning the entire spectrum from clinical and health informatics to public health informatics as applied in the healthcare domain. The field of biomedical and health informatics is examined in a very broad framework, presenting the research and application outcomes of informatics from cell to population and exploring a number of technologies such as imaging, sensors, and biomedical equipment, together with management and organizational aspects including legal and social issues. Setting research priorities in health informatics is also addressed. Providing an overview of the latest developments in health informatics, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on health informatics and healthcare technology for policy makers and healthcare professionals worldwide. This book contains the 110 papers (from 160 submissions) accepted for the 18th annual International Conference on Informatics, Management, and Technology in Healthcare (ICIMTH 2020), held virtually in Athens, Greece, from 3 – 5 July 2020. The conference attracts scientists working in the field of Biomedical and Health Informatics from all continents, and this year it was held as a Virtual Conference, by means of teleconferencing, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdown in many countries around the world. The call for papers for the conference started in December 2019, when signs of the new virus infection were not yet evident, so early submissions were on the usual topics as announced. But papers submitted after mid-March were mostly focused on the first results of the pandemic analysis with respect to informatics in different countries and with different perspectives of the spread of the virus and its influence on public health across the world. This book therefore includes papers on the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to informatics reporting from hospitals and institutions from around the world, including South Korea, Europe, and the USA. The book encompasses the field of biomedical and health informatics in a very broad framework, and the timely inclusion of papers on the current pandemic will make it of particular interest to all those involved in the provision of healthcare everywhere.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) defines the term biomedical informatics (BMI) as: The interdisciplinary field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health. This book: Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics: A Knowledge Base for Practitioners, explores the theories that have been applied in health informatics and the differences they have made. The editors, all proponents of evidence-based health informatics, came together within the European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI) Working Group on Health IT Evaluation and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Working Group on Technology Assessment and Quality Development. The purpose of the book, which has a foreword by Charles Friedman, is to move forward the agenda of evidence-based health informatics by emphasizing theory-informed work aimed at enriching the understanding of this uniquely complex field. The book takes the AMIA definition as particularly helpful in its articulation of the three foundational domains of health informatics: health science, information science, and social science and their various overlaps, and this model has been used to structure the content of the book around the major subject areas. The book discusses some of the most important and commonly used theories relevant to health informatics, and constitutes a first iteration of a consolidated knowledge base that will advance the science of the field.

The digital transformation of healthcare delivery remains a work in progress, and contextual variation continues to be one of the barriers to the development of sustainable health information technology. Context-sensitive health informatics concerns health information technologies and their environments, which may be people such as patients, users, designers and evaluators, but also non-human constructs such as organizations, work practices, guidelines and protocols, or buildings and markets. This book presents papers from CSHI 2019, the international conference on Context Sensitive Health Informatics, held in Lille, France, on 23 and 24 August 2019. The subtitle of the conference was Sustainability in Dynamic Ecosystems, and the thirty papers included here are divided into six sections: understanding organizational contexts; towards sustainable EHR; different contexts for medication errors and patient safety; methods and models to study contexts for health information systems; citizens in health contexts; and designing and evaluating in contexts. Two keynote speeches from the conference are also included. With its focus on context sensitivity and sustainability in digital healthcare, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field of health informatics.

Combining and integrating cross-institutional data remains a challenge for both researchers and those involved in patient care. Patient-generated data can contribute precious information to healthcare professionals by enabling monitoring under normal life conditions and also helping patients play a more active role in their own care. This book presents the proceedings of MEDINFO 2019, the 17th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, held in Lyon, France, from 25 to 30 August 2019. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Health and Wellbeing: E-Networks for All’, stressing the increasing importance of networks in healthcare on the one hand, and the patient-centered perspective on the other. Over 1100 manuscripts were submitted to the conference and, after a thorough review process by at least three reviewers and assessment by a scientific program committee member, 285 papers and 296 posters were accepted, together with 47 podium abstracts, 7 demonstrations, 45 panels, 21 workshops and 9 tutorials. All accepted paper and poster contributions are included in these proceedings. The papers are grouped under four thematic tracks: interpreting health and biomedical data, supporting care delivery, enabling precision medicine and public health, and the human element in medical informatics. The posters are divided into the same four groups. The book presents an overview of state-of-the-art informatics projects from multiple regions of the world; it will be of interest to anyone working in the field of medical informatics.

Digital developments have resulted in many changes in the way healthcare is conceived and delivered. This has brought challenges, but has also created opportunities to shape healthcare, and has made the management and evaluation of systems and innovations, together with the education of healthcare practitioners, essential at all levels. This book presents the proceedings of HIC 2019, the annual Australian national conference for Health Informatics, held in Melbourne, Australia, from 12 – 14 August 2019. The conference provides the ideal environment for clinicians, researchers, health IT professionals, industry and consumers to gather and share their knowledge, to drive innovative thinking, enhance services, improve data-driven decision making, and allow greater consumer involvement. The conference focused on ten themes that underpin a fully digital healthcare sector: analytics and the learning health system; clinical informatics; digital health workforce development; health policy, ethics and business models; informatics in health professional education; innovations, informaticians and digital health entrepreneurship; integrated and connected care; interoperability and informatics infrastructure; participatory medicine and consumer informatics; and system implementations and digital hospitals. The 29 papers selected for inclusion here reflect these themes, highlighting the research and technological innovations that are supporting the digital transformation of the healthcare sector. The book includes examples of important new developments in the field of health informatics, and emphasizes the central role that digital health plays in current and future healthcare organizations everywhere. It will be of interest to all those involved in the field of healthcare.

HANDBOOK OF INTELLIGENT HEALTHCARE ANALYTICS The book explores the various recent tools and techniques used for deriving knowledge from healthcare data analytics for researchers and practitioners. The power of healthcare data analytics is being increasingly used in the industry. Advanced analytics techniques are used against large data sets to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences, and other useful information. A Handbook on Intelligent Healthcare Analytics covers both the theory and application of the tools, techniques, and algorithms for use in big data in healthcare and clinical research. It provides the most recent research findings to derive knowledge using big data analytics, which helps to analyze huge amounts of real-time healthcare data, the analysis of which can provide further insights in terms of procedural, technical, medical, and other types of improvements in healthcare. In addition, the reader will find in this Handbook: Innovative hybrid machine learning and deep learning techniques applied in various healthcare data sets, as well as various kinds of machine learning algorithms existing such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, reinforcement learning, and guides how readers can implement the Python environment for machine learning; An exploration of predictive analytics in healthcare; The various challenges for smart healthcare, including privacy, confidentiality, authenticity, loss of information, attacks, etc., that create a new burden for providers to maintain compliance with healthcare data security. In addition, this book also explores various sources of personalized healthcare data and the commercial platforms for healthcare data analytics. Audience Healthcare professionals, researchers, and practitioners who wish to figure out the core concepts of smart healthcare applications and the innovative methods and technologies used in healthcare will all benefit from this book.

Health Informatics (HI) focuses on the application of Information Technology (IT) to the field of medicine to improve individual and population healthcare delivery, education and research. This extensively updated fifth edition reflects the current knowledge in Health Informatics and provides learning objectives, key points, case studies and references.

Machine learning (ML) is the fastest growing field in computer science, and Health Informatics (HI) is amongst the greatest application challenges, providing future benefits in improved medical diagnoses, disease analyses, and pharmaceutical development. However, successful ML for HI needs a concerted effort, fostering integrative research between experts ranging from diverse disciplines from data science to visualization. Tackling complex challenges needs both disciplinary excellence and cross-disciplinary networking without any boundaries. Following the HCI-KDD approach, in combining the best of two worlds, it is aimed to support human intelligence with machine intelligence. This state-of-the-art survey is an output of the international HCI-KDD expert network and features 22 carefully selected and peer-reviewed chapters on hot topics in machine learning for health informatics; they discuss open problems and future challenges in order to stimulate further research and international progress in this field.

Health IT is a major field of investment in support of healthcare delivery, but patients and professionals tend to have systems imposed upon them by organizational policy or as a result of even higher policy decision. And, while many health IT systems are efficient and welcomed by their users, and are essential to modern healthcare, this is not the case for all. Unfortunately, some systems cause user frustration and result in inefficiency in use, and a few are known to have inconvenienced patients or even caused harm, including the occasional death. This book seeks to answer the need for better understanding of the importance of robust evidence to support health IT and to optimize investment in it; to give insight into health IT evidence and evaluation as its primary source; and to promote health informatics as an underpinning science demonstrating the same ethical rigour and proof of net benefit as is expected of other applied health technologies. The book is divided into three parts: the context and importance of evidence-based health informatics; methodological considerations of health IT evaluation as the source of evidence; and ensuring the relevance and application of evidence. A number of cross cutting themes emerge in each of these sections. This book seeks to inform the reader on the wide range of knowledge available, and the appropriateness of its use according to the circumstances. It is aimed at a wide readership and will be of interest to health policymakers, clinicians, health informaticians, the academic health informatics community, members of patient and policy organisations, and members of the vendor industry.