Challenges For Medical Informatics Research Articles

PoleSat_2018: an optimized, automated, geomatics IT tool based on a gravitational model: strategic decision support in hospital catchment area planning

In France and elsewhere, decision-makers, healthcare professionals and health planners need to better understand and specify the provision of medical care. To this end, a hospital-based research project on a gravitational health planning modelling process was initiated in 2002. Since then, geomatics has emerged as a major scientific field for facing new challenges in medical informatics and health planning, thanks to the use of attractive interfaces, new methods and user-friendly IT technologies. Our initial 2002 model has recently been enhanced, optimized and automated as part of a spatial decision support system (PoleSat_2018). These decisive improvements and optimizations were mainly based on Delaunay triangulation, the replacement of human expertise with a heuristic dominance rule that provides a complete automated algorithm, and an online graphical user interface. Rapid, easy planning scenarios (by grouping and/or closing hospitals) give a quasi-instantaneous, strategic visualization of hospital catchment areas for decision-makers who are not experts in geomatics via ready-to-use maps and spreadsheets. This new implementation achieves our main objective, since the proposed deterministic method provides a completely automated, stable algorithm. A custom version of this tool is now being used by the French Ministry of Health for real planning issues. Consequently, PoleSat could be easily generalized as a prospective, strategic decision support tool for various health planning issues.

Health Care Transformation Through Collaboration on Open-Source Informatics Projects: Integrating a Medical Applications Platform, Research Data Repository, and Patient Summarization

BackgroundThe Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program seeks to conquer well-understood challenges in medical informatics through breakthrough research. Two SHARP centers have found alignment in their methodological needs: (1) members of the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision-making (NCCD) have developed knowledge bases to support problem-oriented summarizations of patient data, and (2) Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies (SMART), which is a platform for reusable medical apps that can run on participating platforms connected to various electronic health records (EHR). Combining the work of these two centers will ensure wide dissemination of new methods for synthesized views of patient data. Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) is an NIH-funded clinical research data repository platform in use at over 100 sites worldwide. By also working with a co-occurring initiative to SMART-enabling i2b2, we can confidently write one app that can be used extremely broadly.ObjectiveOur goal was to facilitate development of intuitive, problem-oriented views of the patient record using NCCD knowledge bases that would run in any EHR. To do this, we developed a collaboration between the two SHARPs and an NIH center, i2b2.MethodsFirst, we implemented collaborative tools to connect researchers at three institutions. Next, we developed a patient summarization app using the SMART platform and a previously validated NCCD problem-medication linkage knowledge base derived from the National Drug File-Reference Terminology (NDF-RT). Finally, to SMART-enable i2b2, we implemented two new Web service “cells” that expose the SMART application programming interface (API), and we made changes to the Web interface of i2b2 to host a “carousel” of SMART apps.ResultsWe deployed our SMART-based, NDF-RT-derived patient summarization app in this SMART-i2b2 container. It displays a problem-oriented view of medications and presents a line-graph display of laboratory results.ConclusionsThis summarization app can be run in any EHR environment that either supports SMART or runs SMART-enabled i2b2. This i2b2 “clinical bridge” demonstrates a pathway for reusable app development that does not require EHR vendors to immediately adopt the SMART API. Apps can be developed in SMART and run by clinicians in the i2b2 repository, reusing clinical data extracted from EHRs. This may encourage the adoption of SMART by supporting SMART app development until EHRs adopt the platform. It also allows a new variety of clinical SMART apps, fueled by the broad aggregation of data types available in research repositories. The app (including its knowledge base) and SMART-i2b2 are open-source and freely available for download.

The Challenge of Ubiquitous Computing in Health Care: Technology, Concepts and Solutions

To review recent research efforts in the field of ubiquitous computing in health care. To identify current research trends and further challenges for medical informatics. Analysis of the contents of the Yearbook on Medical Informatics 2005 of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). The Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2005 includes 34 original papers selected from 22 peer-reviewed scientific journals related to several distinct research areas: health and clinical management, patient records, health information systems, medical signal processing and biomedical imaging, decision support, knowledge representation and management, education and consumer informatics as well as bioinformatics. A special section on ubiquitous health care systems is devoted to recent developments in the application of ubiquitous computing in health care. Besides additional synoptical reviews of each of the sections the Yearbook includes invited reviews concerning E-Health strategies, primary care informatics and wearable healthcare. Several publications demonstrate the potential of ubiquitous computing to enhance effectiveness of health services delivery and organization. But ubiquitous computing is also a societal challenge, caused by the surrounding but unobtrusive character of this technology. Contributions from nearly all of the established sub-disciplines of medical informatics are demanded to turn the visions of this promising new research field into reality.

New Challenges for Health Informatics

Abstract:In March 2001, the International Medical Informatics Association organized a workshop entitled “Challenges in Medical Informatics” in Madrid, Spain. It invited twenty members of the medical* informatics community to discuss current issues relating to the academic standing of the field. The broad objectives of the workshop were (a) to review the relevance of medical informatics as an academic discipline in today’s setting and (b) to examine its impact by the new world economy. One of the issues discussed was to find an appropriate response to the growing emergence of bioinformatics in the age of genomic discovery and molecular medicine. With the exciting discoveries in molecular medicine coming hot on the heels of the first draft of the mapping of the human genome and the availability of high-throughput measurement of gene expressions using microarray techniques, bioinformatics has, in recent years, gained prominence in life sciences research and development. As the next phase of research will see the applications of genomic and proteomic data in the clinical management and treatment of patients, it is inevitable that bioinformatics and health informatics will converge, presenting an exciting new challenge for our field. The terms “biomedical informatics” and “clinical bioinformatics” have been used to describe this convergence.Another exciting challenge for health informatics comes from the spectre of global bioterrorism. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA and the spate of anthrax outbreaks there and elsewhere, there has been an urgent need to review current methods of disease surveillance. Current research in “preventive bioterrorism” focuses on the use of prodromal (warning) symptoms to predict serious infectious disease outbreaks. The health informatics challenge, in this case, is to develop a wide area network of health information systems to achieve real-time reporting of prodromal symptoms from sentinel stations and to deploy datamining and decision analytical techniques for the outbreak predictions.The third challenge to be covered in this presentation relates to the deployment of networked virtual reality for remote tele-rehabilitation of patients with cognitive and physical impairments. While the benefits of deploying telemedicinal principles for remote medical rehabilitation of patients are clear, the costs and use of virtual reality pose a real challenge. Some solutions are proposed in this paper.

Challenges in Medical Informatics

Challenges in Medical Informatics

Challenges for Medical Informatics as an Academic Discipline: Workshop Report

Challenges for Medical Informatics as an Academic Discipline: Workshop Report

Challenges in Medical Informatics

Challenges in Medical Informatics

Challenges in Medical Informatics: Perspectives of an International Medical Informatics Organization

As an international organization with the missions to promote informatics in health care and biomedical research, advance international cooperation, stimulate research, development and education, and disseminate and exchange information, the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) must be constantly cognizant of new developments in medical informatics and address the challenges to the discipline. From an international organization standpoint, it perceives three major challenges viz. the Identity, Organizational and Leadership challenges. This paper attempts to identify and discuss these challenges and to offer ways to overcome them through the activities of an international organization for medical informatics. From an international organization standpoint, IMIA can help overcome these organizational challenges by ensuring strong leadership throughout its echelon, actively promoting its goals and objectives worldwide through its national and institutional members as well as its regional groups and encouraging strategic partnerships between its many Working Groups and Special Interest Group on Nursing with other international organizations and industry to further promote the awareness and the perception of the relevance of medical informatics to health and medicine by the international community.

Challenges for Medical Informatics as an Academic Discipline

In March 2001, twenty members of the informatics community gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the state of our field as an academic discipline and the challenges that university-based workers in health informatics face.The workshop, held under the auspices of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA),was motivated by troubling observations that members of our community have made in recent years. Although the validity of some of these observations is debatable – and certainly was debated at the workshop – concerns have been expressed that: Membership in professional societies

Health Informatics: Challenges to Progress

In 1994 Sittig initiated the pursuit of what he called the “Grand Challenges in Medical Informatics”. Grand Challenges are “fundamental scientific or technological problems whose solutions require significant increases in our current levels of scientific knowledge and/or technical capabilities”. He required of the solutions that they should “significantly improve both the quality and delivery of healthcare while decreasing its costs”. Furthermore, he argued that the solutions “should be achievable within a decade” [1]. He pointed out that the notion of “Grand Challenges” had been a means used by other institutions (e. g. [2]), to focus and plan work in their particular field of endeavour, and proposed that a similar approach should be adopted for Medical Informatics. Sittig took the first steps to compile a list of Challenges, drafting an initial set and obtaining feedback from interested parties. His list of nine was intended to be a start, Sittig himself suggesting ways forward to produce a more authoritative list.

Twenty five years of medical informatics education at Heidelberg/Heilbronn: discussion of a specialized curriculum for medical informatics

The specialized university curriculum for medical informatics (MI) at the University of Heidelberg/School of Technology Heilbronn is one of the oldest educational approaches in the field of MI and has been successful now for 25 years with about 1000 graduates (Diplom-Informatikerin der Medizin or Diplom-Informatiker der Medizin). It belongs to the category of dedicated master's programs for MI and is based on the concept of MI as a medical discipline of its own. It is oriented towards the total spectrum of MI ranging from health care economics, biosignal and medical image processing, medical documentation, to information and knowledge processing in medicine. It is a 4.5 years program with a strong emphasis on the methodological foundations of MI and on practical education in a number of specific laboratories. A total of 35 students are admitted each semester and in total about 440 students are enrolled. The faculty consists of 17 full-time members and about 25 part-time lecturers. The authors report on characteristics, structure and contents of the new fifth version of the curriculum and discuss the features of a specialized curriculum for MI with respect to the challenges for MI in the 21st century.

Medical informatics in the heart of health care

The paper by Reinhold Haux [l] presents ten major long-term aims and tasks. These aims and tasks are essential elements in the health care process. In his earlier paper [2] Haux asks the question “medical informatics: a key to the future of medicine and health care?“. His answer is a clear yes and in [l] he presents his arguments. Medical informatics already plays an essential role in the health care process and I expect that this role will even be more important. It is, however, not sure professional activities are still be called medical informatits in the future. Scherrer has stated “the question should be raised as to how closely informatics is intertwined with medical methodologies” 133. I should like to go even farther to say that medical informatics is medical methodology. In my view the questions to be answered by medical informatics research are all in the heart of health care. Of course I can say that other interesting questions that are not in the heart of health care are not really challenges for medical informatics. So the recognised field of medical informatics is in this way directly related to the areas of interest of different researchers.

Grand challenges in health informatics An information systems perspective commentary on Haux

Challenge papers can be fun. They are good fodder for speeches. They may also serve useful purposes if they provide a focus for our efforts. What is a grand challenge, though? The dictionaries give various mutually related meanings of ‘challenge’ in competitive, enforcement and legal contexts. The definition most appropriate to our scientific context is ‘a stimulating or interesting task or problem’ [2]. Although I do not find a formal definition for a ‘grand challenge’ I concur with Sittig, who proposed in his paper ‘Grand Challenges in Medical Informatics?’ [3]: “ ‘Grand challenges’ are fundamental scientific or technologic problems whose solutions require significant increases in our current levels of scientific knowledge and/or technical capabilities.” In this statement Sittig obviously refers to the scientific context. He also