Background: Surveillance is the backbone for effective public health practice. Traditionally, surveillance system relies on collection of information regarding health-related events through healthcare facilities, disease notification from physician, syndromic networks, selected sentinel or by event-based data. However, there are several limitations in using conventional surveillance. Met...

May 1st, 2017, will mark Dieter Bergemann's 80th birthday. As Chief Executive Officer and Owner of Schattauer Publishers from 1983 to 2016, the biomedical and health informatics community owes him a great debt of gratitude. The past and present editors of Methods of Information in Medicine, the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, and Applied Clinical Informatics want to honour and thank Diete...

Health professionals are able to make right decision in right time only if they posses prompt, accurate and up to date information about health status of patients and general population. They also need knowledge and tools, computer and information technologies, for successful management of huge amount of information. Efficient management of information is of crucial importance for health policy...

The need for informatics-trained professionals in health organizations has been ever-increasing. In addition, there is also a significant need to orchestrate data collection through informatics infrastructure, manage computing resources, store data, and operate network-enabled medical devices. In many medical fields, the overall need for supporting advanced medical devices with complex technolo...

William ‘Bud’ Abbott (1931-2011) was one of the pioneers of Health informatics in the United Kingdom and Europe. Abbott was one of the first generation of health informaticians in Europe. He and his colleagues at the time probably would not have used the term Health/Medical Informatics, because that term first used by Peter Leo Reichertz in Hannover in 1973. Abbott’s death brings to an end an e...

Big data technologies are increasingly used for biomedical and health-care informatics research. Large amounts of biological and clinical data have been generated and collected at an unprecedented speed and scale. For example, the new generation of sequencing technologies enables the processing of billions of DNA sequence data per day, and the application of electronic health records (EHRs) is ...

OBJECTIVE To report on IMIA, the International Medical Informatics Association, and on what has been achieved in the period 2007-2010. METHOD Summarizing IMIA's activities, discussions and decisions, in particular with respect to its Board and General Assembly meetings; looking at recent progress of biomedical and health informatics through IMIA's Yearbook. RESULTS Over the last three years...

OBJECTIVE We compare 5 health informatics research projects that applied community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches with the goal of extending existing CBPR principles to address issues specific to health informatics research. MATERIALS AND METHODS We conducted a cross-case analysis of 5 diverse case studies with 1 common element: integration of CBPR approaches into health infor...

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) represents more than 5,600 healthcare professionals, students, informatics researchers, practitioners, and thought-leaders in biomedicine, healthcare, science. AMIA's members are subject matter experts the science practice of as it relates to clinical care, research, education, policy. They address challenges across continuum health ecosystem'...