Medinfo

A fundamental challenge for medical informatics is to develop and apply better ways of understanding how information technologies and methods can help support the best care for every patient every day given available medical knowledge and resources. In order to provide the most effective healthcare possible, the activities of teams of health professionals have to be coordinated through well-designed processes centered on the needs of patients. For information systems to be accepted and used in such an environment, they must balance standardization based on shared medical knowledge with the flexibility required for customization to the individual patient. Developing innovative approaches to design and build evidence-based careflow management systems is essential for providing the knowledge management infrastructure of health care organizations that seeks to increase performance in delivering high quality care services by efficiently exploiting available resources. Parallel challenges arise in the organization of research at the biological and clinical levels, where the focus on systematically organizing and supporting processes of scientific inquiry by novel informatics methods and databases are in their very early stages. These Proceedings of Medinfo 2004 demonstrate the base of knowledge medical informatics professionals will collectively draw upon in the years ahead to meet these challenges and realize opportunities.

The papers presented are refereed and from all over the world. They reflect the breadth and depth of the field of biomedical and health informatics, covering topics such as; health information systems, knowledge and data management, education, standards, consumer health and human factors, emerging technologies, sustainability, organizational and economic issues, genomics, and image and signal processing. As this volume carries such a wide collection, it will be of great interest to anyone engaged in biomedical and health informatics research and application.

Health and Biomedical Informatics is a rapidly evolving multidisciplinary field; one in which new developments may prove crucial in meeting the challenge of providing cost-effective, patient-centered healthcare worldwide. This book presents the proceedings of MEDINFO 2015, held in São Paulo, Brazil, in August 2015. The theme of this conference is ‘eHealth-enabled Health’, and the broad spectrum of topics covered ranges from emerging methodologies to successful implementations of innovative applications, integration and evaluation of eHealth systems and solutions. Included here are 178 full papers and 248 poster abstracts, selected after a rigorous review process from nearly 800 submissions by 2,500 authors from 59 countries. The conference brings together researchers, clinicians, technologists and managers from all over the world to share their experiences on the use of information methods, systems and technologies to promote patient-centered care, improving patient safety, enhancing care outcomes, facilitating translational research and enabling precision medicine, as well as advancing education and skills in Health and Biomedical Informatics. This comprehensive overview of Health and Biomedical Informatics will be of interest to all those involved in designing, commissioning and providing healthcare, wherever they may be.

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”, and its constitution also asserts that health for all people is “dependent on the fullest co-operation of individuals and States”. The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the power of both healthy and unhealthy information, so while healthcare and public health services have depended upon timely and accurate data and continually updated knowledge, social media has shown how unhealthy misinformation can be spread and amplified, reinforcing existing prejudices, conspiracy theories and political biases. This book presents the proceedings of MedInfo 2021, the 18th World Congress of Medical and Health Informatics, held as a virtual event from 2-4 October 2021, with pre-recorded presentations for all accepted submissions. The theme of the conference was One World, One Health – Global Partnership for Digital Innovation and submissions were requested under 5 themes: information and knowledge management; quality, safety and outcomes; health data science; human, organizational and social aspects; and global health informatics. The Programme Committee received 352 submissions from 41 countries across all IMIA regions, and 147 full papers, 60 student papers and 79 posters were accepted for presentation after review and are included in these proceedings. Providing an overview of current work in the field over a wide range of disciplines, the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves some aspect of medical or health informatics.

A fundamental challenge for medical informatics is to develop and apply better ways of understanding how information technologies and methods can help support the best care for every patient every day given available medical knowledge and resources. In order to provide the most effective healthcare possible, the activities of teams of health professionals have to be coordinated through well-designed processes centered on the needs of patients. For information systems to be accepted and used in such an environment, they must balance standardization based on shared medical knowledge with the flexibility required for customization to the individual patient. Developing innovative approaches to design and build evidence-based careflow management systems is essential for providing the knowledge management infrastructure of health care organizations that seeks to increase performance in delivering high quality care services by efficiently exploiting available resources. Parallel challenges arise in the organization of research at the biological and clinical levels, where the focus on systematically organizing and supporting processes of scientific inquiry by novel informatics methods and databases are in their very early stages. These Proceedings of Medinfo 2004 demonstrate the base of knowledge medical informatics professionals will collectively draw upon in the years ahead to meet these challenges and realize opportunities.

The IFIP World Conference Series on Medical Informatics is a series of volumes, which has been published triennially since 1974. This sixth volume in the series is a comprehensive overview of Medical Informatics containing refereed research papers, the best of over 800 submissions from 47 countries.

The field of medical informatics has steadily matured and MEDINFO 92 shows an upturn in the uses of informatics in the health sector. This volume contains significant contributions on diverse issues, a popular field being knowledge-based work: concepts, methodologies, software and other tools, systems and evaluations of systems and experiences. Several papers describe functional integration between differing systems, institutions and even geographic areas; they confirm a trend towards having knowledge-based systems contained in, or integrated with, overall management information systems serving the physician as well as the rest of the health support team. As well as contributions on those topics that have been covered in MEDINFO congresses since their inception in 1974, such as bibliographic systems, nursing informatics and hospital information systems, other issues addressed include data standards such as semantics, syntax and communication standards; the quality, accuracy and ethical values of medical data; and developments in networking.