Biomedical Informatics Revolutionizing Changes in Health Care Delivery

Abstract

The Symposium on Biomedical Informatics: Confluence of Multiple Disciplines held in Heidelberg, Germany at the University of Heidelberg s Internationales Wissenschaftsforum in 2011 reflected opportunities, challenges and priorities of organizing, representing and analyzing data, information and knowledge in biomedicine and health care. As an outcome of the symposium, five manuscripts were published in the journal Methods of Information in Medicine, Volume 50, No. 6, 2011. Biomedical Informatics is a discipline that has a great impact on many other fields and is also influenced by them. For this reasons biomedical informatics based on collaborative research brings new opportunities for revolutionizing changes in health care delivery. The aim of the editorial board of the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics (EJBI) is to reach the highest scientific level of the journal and to show the best practices of biomedical informatics applications to wide readership. It has been often important for health professionals to have the possibility to read important articles not only in English but also in their native language. For this reason EJBI publishes accepted peer-reviewed papers in English and other languages simultaneously. This opens new possibilities for faster transfer of scientific-research pieces of knowledge to a large international community of biomedical researches, physicians, other health personnel and citizens. Since 2012 (Volume 8) the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics begins to implement several changes, which will bring new opportunities for authors and readers. The journal publishes peer-reviewed original articles, review articles, reports, opinions papers and editorials in the field of biomedical informatics and applications in health care. EJBI provides immediate open access to peer-reviewed papers, which will be published in the running first issue of EJBI during each calendar year. The other issues of EJBI in each calendar year are EJBI approved special issues related to different biomedical informatics topics. Authors do not pay an article processing fee for the immediate release of peer-reviewed articles, but a small financial support is required in case that the support of projects or sponsors is acknowledged (see instructions to authors and ejbi-template). However, for further development of EJBI and its multilingual objectives we offer the possibility of sponsorship of single issues of EJBI (see more information here) to support dissemination of new information and knowledge in other languages than in English. Topics for special issues can be proposed to the editor-inchief of EJBI using the Proposal of EJBI special issue form for further processing. The topic for special issue is specified by an open call or by a special event. In the year 2012 we will publish two special issues based on open calls with special topics Support of eHealth Applications by Legal Systems in Europe and Standards and Solutions for eHealth Interoperability. The other special issues in 2012 will be directly connected with different events, e.g. conferences, symposia, workshops etc. We plan to prepare special issues connected with the MIE 2012 conference (Pisa, Italy, August 28-31, 2012) and with the Ph.D. students conference Semantic Interoperability in Biomedicine and Health Care (First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, November 22, 2012). In the year 2013 we plan to have a special issue connected with the forthcoming EFMI special topic conference Data and Knowledge for Medical Decision Support (Prague, April 17-19, 2013). We invite you to propose special topics that would help to accelerate needed changes in health care by easy transfer of a new information and knowledge for health care delivery.