Healthier Lives Digitally Enabled

Disruption often drives innovation, and 2020 was certainly an extraordinary year for all health professionals. Not only did it stretch individual providers and healthcare systems to their limits, it highlighted the urgent and rapid need to mobilize digital health technology, as well as pressure-testing digital health in ways and under timeframes not previously imagined. Many saw the rapid deployment and uptake of telehealth services, partly out of necessity to maintain continuity of care, but also to ensure that those who needed healthcare were still able to access it no matter what their situation or location. This book presents 17 selected papers from the Australian Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2020) – Healthier Lives, Digitally Enabled, held online from 5 – 25 November 2020. This annual conference usually marks the coming together of the nation’s digital health community to discuss, share and showcase current and future initiatives that support the progression of digital health, but in 2020, it took the form of satellite events, culminating with an online Digital Health Institute Summit. The papers presented here reflect highly topical themes across various areas and disciplines, including: digital health in the care of the elderly, mental health, COVID-19, public health, and workforce. Familiar topics, such as wearables, mobile health and remote monitoring, interoperability, and data privacy are also covered, as well as telehealth, automation, bots, and other AI applications. The book will be of interest to all health professionals, especially those working in the fields of digital health informatics and telemedicine.

Disruption often drives innovation, and 2020 was certainly an extraordinary year for all health professionals. Not only did it stretch individual providers and healthcare systems to their limits, it highlighted the urgent and rapid need to mobilize digital health technology, as well as pressure-testing digital health in ways and under timeframes not previously imagined. Many saw the rapid deployment and uptake of telehealth services, partly out of necessity to maintain continuity of care, but also to ensure that those who needed healthcare were still able to access it no matter what their situation or location. This book presents 17 selected papers from the Australian Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2020) - Healthier Lives, Digitally Enabled, held online from 5 - 25 November 2020. This annual conference usually marks the coming together of the nation's digital health community to discuss, share and showcase current and future initiatives that support the progression of digital health, but in 2020, it took the form of satellite events, culminating with an online Digital Health Institute Summit. The papers presented here reflect highly topical themes across various areas and disciplines, including: digital health in the care of the elderly, mental health, COVID-19, public health, and workforce. Familiar topics, such as wearables, mobile health and remote monitoring, interoperability, and data privacy are also covered, as well as telehealth, automation, bots, and other AI applications. The book will be of interest to all health professionals, especially those working in the fields of digital health informatics and telemedicine.

This book highlights the latest advances on the implementation and adaptation of blockchain technologies in real-world scientific, biomedical, and data applications. It presents rapid advancements in life sciences research and development by applying the unique capabilities inherent in distributed ledger technologies. The book unveils the current uses of blockchain in drug discovery, drug and device tracking, real-world data collection, and increased patient engagement used to unlock opportunities to advance life sciences research. This paradigm shift is explored from the perspectives of pharmaceutical professionals, biotechnology start-ups, regulatory agencies, ethical review boards, and blockchain developers. This book enlightens readers about the opportunities to empower and enable data in life sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need for the collection of data. Such data cannot be collected or provided without medical informatics, documentation and health data management. Nor can health data be evaluated and converted into a useful tool for making the important decisions that affect us all without biometrics and epidemiology, bioinformatics and systems biology. This book presents full papers from GMDS & CEN-IBS 2020, the first joint online conference of the German Association of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS) and the Central European Network & the International Biometric Society (CEN-IBS), held online between 6 and 11 September 2020. The title of the conference was Bringing Data to Life, a reference to the increasing amount of data in medical research which is inextricably related to the fast-developing digitalization of the health system. Many challenges must be addressed in order to make use of and benefit from these increasing sources of data, and these can only be faced if all disciplines related to data science work together. The conference aimed to bring together the diverse disciplines within data science, including medical informatics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, epidemiology, public health and medical documentation. Topics covered in the book include central themes relevant to society in general and advances in data technology which support innovations in medical research in particular. The book brings together many topics related to the provision and analysis of data in medicine, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

Nurses and midwives must increasingly work in multi-disciplinary teams and engage with patients to navigate the data and information central to today’s digitally-driven healthcare system. This book presents the proceedings of NI 2021, the 15th International Congress in Nursing Informatics. Originally planned to be held in 2020, the international year of the nurse and midwife, but postponed due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the conference, with the theme of nursing and midwifery in the digital age, was eventually held as a virtual event from 23 August to 2 September 2021, and the organizers made the decision to take advantage of its virtual nature and extend it to 9 days, with each day focusing on a different theme. This is reflected in the organization of the book, and the 212 papers included here, of which 67 are full papers with the remainder being workshop, panel, case study, and poster abstracts, are grouped into 9 sections. The papers were selected from a total of 437 submissions from more than 40 countries and cover: data analytics and the use of nursing data; digital health nursing workforce development; health policy, service delivery and ethics; informatics in clinical care; innovation and entrepreneurship in nursing; integrated and connected care; nursing information systems; patient participation and citizen involvement; and systems implementation and digital workplaces. Highlighting developments in nursing and midwifery and the way in which nurses and midwives are embracing the digital age, the book will be of interest to all those involved in healthcare today.

Aside from the dramatic effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the lives of people everywhere, it has also triggered and accelerated some important process changes in healthcare. Digital health has become ever more important, supporting test strategies and contact tracing, statistical analysis, prognostic modeling, and vaccination roll-out and documentation. Video calls have become more common, and it seems likely that all these changes will continue to influence healthcare in the longer-term. This book presents the proceedings of dHealth 2021 – the 15th annual conference on Health Informatics Meets Digital Health – held as a virtual conference on 11 & 12 May 2021. The dHealth conference is where research and application meet as equals, and the conference series has been contributing to scientific exchange and networking since 2007. The 2021 edition is the second that has been organized virtually. Each year, this event attracts 300+ participants from academia, industry, government and healthcare organizations, and provides a platform for researchers, practitioners, decision makers and vendors to discuss innovative health informatics and dHealth solutions with the aim of improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare. The 24 papers included here offer an insight into the research on digital health conducted during the COVID-19 crisis, and topics include the management of infectious diseases, telehealth services, standardization and interoperability in healthcare, nursing informatics, data analytics, predictive modeling and digital tools for rare-disease research. The book provides new healthcare insights from both science and practice, and will be of interest to all those working in healthcare.

Science-fiction author William Gibson is famously quoted as saying, “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” During the Covid pandemic, telehealth and remote monitoring were elevated from interesting innovations to essential tools in many healthcare systems, but not all countries had the infrastructure necessary to pivot quickly, amply demonstrating the negative consequences of the digital divide. This book presents the proceedings of MedInfo 2023, the 19th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, held from 8 – 12 July 2023 in Sydney, Australia. This series of biennial conferences provides a platform for the discussion of applied approaches to data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in health and wellness. The theme and title of MedInfo 2023 was The Future is Accessible, but the digital divide is a major concern for health and care-informatics professionals, whether because of global economic disparities, digital literacy gaps, or limited access to reliable information about health. A total of 935 submissions were received for the conference, of which 228 full papers, 43 student papers and 117 posters were accepted following a thorough peer-review process involving 279 reviewers. Topics covered include: information and knowledge management; quality, safety and outcomes; health data science; human, organizational and social aspects; and global health informatics. Significant advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and genomics hold great hope for future healthcare planning, delivery, management, education, evaluation, and research, and this book will be of interest to all those working to not only exploit the benefits of these technologies, but also to identify ways to overcome their associated challenges.

The need to promote academic activities in telehealth remains a high priority as the discipline expands into new areas of healthcare. Response during 2020 to the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an excellent example of the rapid diversification and impact attainable with telehealth, and may kindle a new momentum for accelerated service design and adoption processes in the future. This book, Telehealth Innovations in Remote Healthcare Services Delivery, is the tenth in the Global Telehealth series. Due to the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions placed on academic gatherings, the organizers issued a general call for contributions, with the intention of attracting a wide cross-section of contributions reflecting the breadth of different aspects of telehealth internationally. The resulting collection offers snapshots of research projects and studies of service experience from five continents, with an emphasis on delivering benefits in regional settings in keeping with the theme of the book’s title. Articles range from descriptions of telehealth networks and clinical-service instances such as cardiac health, mental health and pathology, several in Pacific-rim settings, to more generic papers on the evolution of such services, as well as commentaries on innovative considerations for telehealth such as the emergence of the concept of virtual care, the suitability of health apps, and the status of eHealth readiness in the developing world. This book is a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge on current telehealth research interests and trends, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.