Health Informatics Meets eHealth

Abstract

Health informatics develops methods and tools that should, when applied to health care, contribute to a high-quality, efficient care of individuals and populations [1]. The translation of health informatics research into practice can be seen as a “continuum” from IT development to healthcare problem solving [2], starting with developing and validating early solutions (tools, algorithms, technologies ...) that are then integrated and tested in clinical practice, first in small pilot projects, later in larger evaluation studies. Scientific publication of the outcome of these projects and studies is an important step to increase awareness on new solutions, to allow sharing of experiences, and to decide on continuation or stop of the developments as part of evidence-based health informatics [3]. Health informatics has been developing solutions for intra-organizational information systems for many decades now. Recently, with the emergence of inter-organi zational (or trans-institutional) information systems [1, 4], the term “eHealth” has been shaped to describe “an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies” [5]. Generally speaking, the term eHealth encompasses more traditional concepts such as telemedicine and tele monitoring [6] as well as newer concepts such as shared electronic health records [7] or pervasive health care systems [8]. eHealth applications offer the potential for large benefits for health care, such as improved quality of care, patient empowerment, health promotion, and cost savings [9 –11]. However, a lot of challenges need to be overcome to exploit these potential benefits, such as semantic and technical integration and human-computer interaction [12], but also social, cultural, eco nomical and organizational challenges [10, 13], as eHealth will have an impact on the way health care is delivered in the future. This special issue presents the best three contributions from the eHealth2009 conference in Vienna, highlighting recent challenges and achievements in the area of eHealth. The eHealth-conference series is an annual series of scientific events dealing with health informatics methods and their applications to eHealth [14]. The paper by Christoph Rinner and coauthors [15] tackles the problem of semantic interoperability. At the moment, XML-based document standards such as Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) or ISO/EN 13606 are being developed to support semantic interoperability within inter-organizational information systems. The authors present an approach to automatically validate EHR documents, to assess whether they are conformant to the described standards. Their approach allows EHR documents to be validated for conformance with the underlying reference models and archetypes of the mentioned standards by means of XML schema, without requiring an additional validation language. This will allow simplifying the overall validation process in the future. The paper by Tuncay Namli and Asuman Dogac [16] addresses the technical interoperability of EHR systems. There are many standards and initiatives (such as HL7 v3 or IHE) that support the exchange of data. To allow interoperability based on these standards, application systems need to prove that they are conformant to these standards. The authors present an automated, modular and scenario-based testing framework that allows testing conformMethods Inf Med 2010; 49: 269–270