Public Health Informatics

This revised edition covers all aspects of public health informatics and discusses the creation and management of an information technology infrastructure that is essential in linking state and local organizations in their efforts to gather data for the surveillance and prevention. Public health officials will have to understand basic principles of information resource management in order to make the appropriate technology choices that will guide the future of their organizations. Public health continues to be at the forefront of modern medicine, given the importance of implementing a population-based health approach and to addressing chronic health conditions. This book provides informatics principles and examples of practice in a public health context. In doing so, it clarifies the ways in which newer information technologies will improve individual and community health status. This book's primary purpose is to consolidate key information and promote a strategic approach to information systems and development, making it a resource for use by faculty and students of public health, as well as the practicing public health professional. Chapter highlights include: The Governmental and Legislative Context of Informatics; Assessing the Value of Information Systems; Ethics, Information Technology, and Public Health; and Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security. Review questions are featured at the end of every chapter. Aside from its use for public health professionals, the book will be used by schools of public health, clinical and public health nurses and students, schools of social work, allied health, and environmental sciences.

For several years now, both eHealth applications and digitalization have been seen as fundamental to the new era of health informatics and public health. The current pandemic situation has also highlighted the importance of medical informatics for the scientific process of evidence-based reasoning and decision making at all levels of healthcare. This book presents the accepted full papers, short papers, and poster papers delivered as part of the 31st Medical Informatics in Europe Conference (MIE 2021), held virtually from 29-31 May 2021. MIE 2021 was originally due to be held in Athens, Greece, but due to the continuing pandemic situation, the conference was held as a virtual event. The 261 papers included here are grouped into 7 chapters: biomedical data, tools and methods; supporting care delivery; health and prevention; precision medicine and public health; human factors and citizen centered digital health; ethics, legal and societal aspects; and posters. Providing a state-of-the-art overview of medical informatics from around the world, the book will be of interest to all those working with eHealth applications and digitalization to improve the delivery of healthcare today.

Let us not go over the old ground, let us rather prepare for what is to come. —Marcus Tullius Cicero Improvements in the health status of communities depend on effective public health and healthcare infrastructures. These infrastructures are increasingly electronic and tied to the Internet. Incorporating emerging technologies into the service of the community has become a required task for every public health leader. The revolution in information technology challenges every sector of the health enterprise. Individuals, care providers, and public health agencies can all benefit as we reshape public health through the adoption of new infor- tion systems, use of electronic methods for disease surveillance, and refor- tion of outmoded processes. However, realizing the benefits will be neither easy nor inexpensive. Technological innovation brings the promise of new ways of improving health. Individuals have become more involved in knowing about, and managing and improving, their own health through Internet access. Similarly, healthcare p- viders are transforming the ways in which they assess, treat, and document - tient care through their use of new technologies. For example, point-of-care and palm-type devices will soon be capable of uniquely identifying patients, s- porting patient care, and documenting treatment simply and efficiently.

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.

As public accountability has increased and resources have become scarcer, public health, like clinical medicine, has been forced to re-examine the benefits and costs of its activities. Decision and economic analysis are basic tools in carrying out that mission. These methods have become standard practice in clinical medicine and health services research. This book , now in its second edition, was written in an effort to apply and adapt that experience with public health situations.The book was originally written to introduce Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to the concepts of decision and economic analysis, to provide guidance on methods to maximize comparability of studios, and to provide access to frequently used reference information. It has been adapted to meet the needs of scientists and managers in state and local health departments and managed care organizations as well as students in schools of public health and clinicians for an introductory text --a text that shows how these methods can be applied in population-based practice, to facilitate better comparability of studies, and to solidify understanding of the scientific basis for use of these tools in decision making. Decision makers will learn how these studies are conducted so they can be critical consumers-- understanding the strengths and limitations- and apply findings to policy and practice.The second edition updates and expands upon the standard methodology for condcuting prevention effectiveness analyses. Each chapter has been revised or re-written. The chapters on measuring effectiveness, decision analysis, and making information useful for decision makers as well as several appendices are entirely new.

The effective and efficient management of healthcare institutions is key to the successful development of national health systems. In an increasingly digital society, the skills involved in health information management become a primary factor in ensuring this development. Employment is projected to grow in all areas of healthcare, but especially in those related to information management, such as applied informatics, public health informatics and medical informatics. This book, Health Information Management: Empowering Public Health, aims to provide a clear and comprehensive introduction to the study and development of health information management. It is designed for use by university and vocational courses to train allied health professionals. It can also be used as an in-service training tool for new healthcare-facility personnel, for those working in government healthcare institutions, independent billing and health assurance services, or individually by health information specialists. The book describes health information management, and explains how it merges the fields of health care and information technology. Readers will learn logical thinking and communication, and will be introduced to the organizational processes in healthcare institutions, as well as finding out how to organize and analyze health care data; accurately record, store and assess health data; use an electronic patient record system; and provide statistical analysis and interpret the results. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to gain a better insight into what is involved health information management, and to all those studying the subject.

Population Health Informatics addresses the growing opportunity to utilize technology to put into practice evidence-based solutions to improve population health outcomes across diverse settings. The book focuses on how to operationalize population informatics solutions to address important public health challenges impacting individuals, families, communities, and the environment in which they live. The book uniquely uses a practical, step-by-step approach to implement evidence-based, data- driven population informatics solutions.

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.