The Importance of Health Informatics in Public Health during a Pandemic


Book Description

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.




Public Health and Informatics


Book Description

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.




Oncology Informatics


Book Description

Oncology Informatics: Using Health Information Technology to Improve Processes and Outcomes in Cancer Care encapsulates National Cancer Institute-collected evidence into a format that is optimally useful for hospital planners, physicians, researcher, and informaticians alike as they collectively strive to accelerate progress against cancer using informatics tools. This book is a formational guide for turning clinical systems into engines of discovery as well as a translational guide for moving evidence into practice. It meets recommendations from the National Academies of Science to "reorient the research portfolio" toward providing greater "cognitive support for physicians, patients, and their caregivers" to "improve patient outcomes." Data from systems studies have suggested that oncology and primary care systems are prone to errors of omission, which can lead to fatal consequences downstream. By infusing the best science across disciplines, this book creates new environments of "Smart and Connected Health." Oncology Informatics is also a policy guide in an era of extensive reform in healthcare settings, including new incentives for healthcare providers to demonstrate "meaningful use" of these technologies to improve system safety, engage patients, ensure continuity of care, enable population health, and protect privacy. Oncology Informatics acknowledges this extraordinary turn of events and offers practical guidance for meeting meaningful use requirements in the service of improved cancer care. Anyone who wishes to take full advantage of the health information revolution in oncology to accelerate successes against cancer will find the information in this book valuable. Presents a pragmatic perspective for practitioners and allied health care professionals on how to implement Health I.T. solutions in a way that will minimize disruption while optimizing practice goals Proposes evidence-based guidelines for designers on how to create system interfaces that are easy to use, efficacious, and timesaving Offers insight for researchers into the ways in which informatics tools in oncology can be utilized to shorten the distance between discovery and practice




Context Sensitive Health Informatics: The Role of Informatics in Global Pandemics


Book Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many global industries, none more so than healthcare, and has necessitated the need for health informatics innovations that can bridge time and space to provide timely care. It has also emphasized the need for a system-level informatics infrastructure to support the healthcare management of populations at a macro level, while also providing the necessary support for front line care delivery at a micro level. However, the need for change at a fast pace does not remove the need for an evidence base to support health technologies. This raises fundamental questions about how the informatics tools required can be delivered at pace without compromising the quality and safety of such tools. This book presents papers from the biennial conference on Context Sensitive Health Informatics, CSHI 2021, held as a virtual event on 15 and 16 November 2021. The theme of the 2021 conference was: The Role of Informatics in Global Pandemics, and this book includes 18 papers on a variety of topics, divided into 4 sections: health information management in the COVID-19 context; implementation of new practices and technologies in healthcare; sociotechnical analysis of task performance and workload in healthcare; and innovations in design and evaluation methods of health technologies. The book provides an overview of innovative health information systems rooted in robust scientific research on context and health information technology, and will be of interest to all those working in the field of health informatics.




Evidence-Based Health Informatics


Book Description

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.







Navigating Healthcare Through Challenging Times


Book Description

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.




Infectious Disease Informatics


Book Description

Computer-based infectious disease surveillance systems are capable of real-time or near real-time detection of serious illnesses and potential bioterrorism agent exposures and represent a major step forward in disease surveillance. Infectious Disease Informatics: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense is an in-depth monograph that analyzes and evaluates the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of existing surveillance systems under a unified framework, and presents the first book-length coverage of the subject from an informatics-driven perspective. Individual chapters consider the state of the art, including the facilitation of data collection, sharing and transmission; a focus on various outbreak detection methods; data visualization and information dissemination issues; and system assessment and other policy issues. Eight chapters then report on several real-world case studies, summarizing and comparing eight syndromic surveillance systems, including those that have been adopted by many public health agencies (e.g., RODS and BioSense). The book concludes with a discussion of critical issues and challenges, with a look to future directions. This book is an excellent source of current information for researchers in public health and IT. Government public health officials and private-sector practitioners in both public health and IT will find the most up-to-date information available, and students from a variety of disciplines, including public health, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy will get a comprehensive look at the concepts, techniques, and practices of syndromic surveillance.




Healthcare Informatics for Fighting COVID-19 and Future Epidemics


Book Description

This book presents innovative solutions utilising informatics to deal with various issues related to the COVID-19 outbreak. The book offers a collection of contemporary research and development on the management of Covid-19 using health data analytics, information exchange, knowledge sharing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the Internet of Everything (IoE)-based solutions. The book also analyses the implementation, assessment, adoption, and management of these healthcare informatics solutions to manage the pandemic and future epidemics. The book is relevant to researchers, professors, students, and professionals in informatics and related topics.




Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's New API is Transforming Healthcare


Book Description

This textbook begins with an introduction to the US healthcare delivery system, its many systemic challenges and the prior efforts to develop and deploy informatics tools to help overcome those problems. It goes on to discuss health informatics from an historical perspective, its current state and its likely future state now that electronic health record systems are widely deployed, the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability standard is being rapidly accepted as the means to access the data stored in those systems and analytics is increasing being used to gain new knowledge from that aggregated clinical data. It then turns to some of the important and evolving areas of informatics including population and public health, mHealth and big data and analytics. Use cases and case studies are used in all of these discussions to help readers connect the technologies to real world challenges. Effective use of informatics systems and tools by providers and their patients is key to improving the quality, safety and cost of healthcare. With health records now digital, no effective means has existed for sharing them with patients, among the multiple providers who may care for them and for important secondary uses such as public/population health and research. This problem is a topic of congressional discussion and is addressed by the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 that mandates that electronic health record (EHR) systems offer a patient-facing API. HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is that API and this is the first comprehensive treatment of the technology and the many ways it is already being used. FHIR is based on web technologies and is thus a far more facile, easy to implement approach that is rapidly gaining acceptance. It is also the basis for a ‘universal health app platform’ that literally has the potential to foster innovation around the data in patient records similar to the app ecosystems smartphones created around the data they store. FHIR app stores have already been opened by Epic and Cerner, the two largest enterprise EHR vendors. Provider facing apps are already being explored to improve EHR usability and support personalized medicine. Medicare and the Veteran’s Administration have announced FHIR app platforms for their patients. Apple’s new IOS 11.3 features the ability for consumers to aggregate their health records on their iPhone using FHIR. Health insurance companies are exploring applications of FHIR to improve service and communication with their providers and patients. SureScripts, the national e-Prescribing network, is using FHIR to help doctors know if their patients are complying with prescriptions. This textbook is for introductory health informatics courses for computer science and health sciences students (e.g. doctors, nurses, PhDs), the current health informatics community, IT professionals interested in learning about the field and practicing healthcare providers. Though this textbook covers an important new technology, it is accessible to non-technical readers including healthcare providers, their patients or anyone interested in the use of healthcare data for improved care, public/population health or research.