Informatics calls for papers / publications

Call for Chapters: Cloud Computing Applications for Quality Health Care Delivery

Editors

Dr. Anastasius Moumtzoglou (“P. & A. Kyriakou” Children’s Hospital, President of the Hellenic Society for Quality & Safety in Healthcare, Greece);

Dr. Anastasia Kastania (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)

Proposals Submission Deadline: May 30, 2013

Full Chapters Due: August 30, 2013

Submission Date: November 30, 2013

For release in the Advances in Medical Technologies and Clinical Practice (AMTCP) Book Series

The Internet, having its roots in telephony applications in the early 1990s, is often referred to as “The Cloud.” By the turn of the millennium, the Internet was referred to as broadband, and the term “in the cloud” was highly desired. Telephone utilities were investing in “The Cloud” for switching and routing the appropriate connections for phone calls, faxes, live feeds, and signals. Then, around the middle of the decade, Computational Cloud Services, called “Cloud Computing,” was firmly in the vocabulary as a way to describe what the user was doing: accessing computing services in the cloud.

At the beginning of the decade, companies began building their websites in such a way that users could utilize their services exclusively through the use of a browser. Shortly, through the use of more powerful technologies, “in the cloud” applications became commonplace. By the middle of the decade, most leading corporations with a strong Web presence had reasonable and reliable operation of their services exclusively “in the cloud.”

The “Cloud” represents a fundamental change in the use of IT services, which involves a shift from owning and managing the IT system to accessing IT systems as a service. The term Cloud Services, a distinct terminology from outsourced IT hosting, comes from the fact that the Internet has often been depicted as a “Cloud.” Cloud Services have been defined as the services that meet the following criteria:

Consumers neither own the hardware on which data processing and storage happens, nor the software that performs the data processing.
Consumers have the ability to access and use the service at any time over the Internet.
As a result, the definition of Cloud Services is twofold. The first part pertains to the ownership of the actual hardware and software that is used to perform data storage and data processing, while the second part refers to the client’s ability to access the service remotely when it needs to use it.

On the other hand, as definitions evolved, Cloud Computing denoted the influence of cloud, and implied the user experience moving away from personal computers to a “cloud” of computers. In this context, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defined Cloud Computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. Essential characteristics, according to NIST, include on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Service Models include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), while deployment models include the Private cloud, the Community cloud, the Public cloud, and the Hybrid cloud.

Moreover, the research firm IDC described Cloud Computing as “an emerging IT development, deployment and distribution model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.” It also defined Cloud Services as “Consumer and Business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet.” Finally, analyst firm Gartner defined Cloud Computing as “a model of computing in which scalable and flexible IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.”

As far as healthcare is concerned, the trend appears to be irreversible. Software applications and information once in the realm of a local computer or a local server are now in the sphere of the public Internet. Private health information once confined to local networks is migrating onto the Internet. Patients voluntarily grant access to their health records, while the collection and management of this data is entirely legal. Microsoft and Google are two notable examples of companies following the accelerating likelihood of placing, once restricted and private health records, “in the cloud.” Their initiatives hold the attention timing and force convergence of events if we consider the “Transforming Healthcare Through IT” and “Enabling Healthcare Reform Using Information Technology” initiatives.

Objective of the Book

The book will provide an overview of cloud technologies that might affect quality in healthcare. The proposed book intends to provide a compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations of concepts, processes, and acronyms. Additionally, it will present chapters (each chapter consisting of 7,000-10,000 words) authored by leading experts, offering an in-depth description of key terms and concepts related to the demystification of healthcare quality in the Cloud.

Target Audience

The prospective audience includes undergraduate and extended degree programs students, graduate students of health care quality and health services management, executive education and continuing education, health care managers and health professionals.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Healthcare Cloud computing and Web Services

Definition, features and types of cloud services in healthcare

Adoption of cloud services and quality in healthcare

Benefits and drawbacks of cloud services in healthcare

Cloud technologies and quality in healthcare

Cloud-based systems for healthcare information technology and quality in healthcare

Cloud Perspective for HIPAA and HITECH

Interoperability

Privacy in Healthcare Cloud Computing

High Performance Computing in the Healthcare Cloud

Information Assurance and Security in Cloud Computing

Characteristics of Cloud-based Healthcare Organisations Cloud-based EMRs and quality in healthcare

Cloud-based medical practice management applications and quality in healthcare

Cloud-based patient portals and quality in healthcare

Cloud-based ePrescription systems and quality in healthcare

Cloud-based Laboratory solutions and quality in healthcare

Mobile Cloud Computing and quality in healthcare

Mobile Multimedia-Cloud Computing

Cloud healthcare simulation

Autonomic Clouds in Healthcare

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before May 30, 2013, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by June 15, 2013 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by August 30, 2013. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference” and “IGI Publishing” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2014.

Important Dates:

May 30, 2013: Proposal Submission Deadline

June 15, 2013: Notification of Acceptance

August 30, 2013: Full Chapter Submission

October 30, 2013: Review Results Returned

November 30, 2013: Final Chapter Submission

February 15, 2014: Final deadline

Editorial Advisory Board

Vahe A. Kazandjian, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Dimitris Koutsouris, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Athina Lazakidou, University of Peloponnese, Greece

Ales Bourek, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Kathleen Abrahamson, Purdue University, USA

George Bohoris, University of Piraeus, Greece

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document):

Dr. Anastasius Moumtzoglou
“P. & A. Kyriakou” Children’s Hospital
Thivon & Levadias, 11527 Athens, Greece
Tel.: +302132009822 • GSM: +306974558870
E-mail: anas1@hol.gr

Dr. Anastasia Kastania
Athens University of Economis and Business
Patission 76 Str, 10434 Athens, Greece
Tel: +30-210-8203158, Fax: +30-210-8203157, GSM: +306944546208
E-mail: ank@aueb.gr

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Methods of Information in Medicine Journal: Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems

We are inviting submissions for an issue of the Methods of Information in Medicine devoted to the latest advances in bio-medical and e-health knowledge and information management research. The recent large-scale deployment of Electronic Health Records (EHR) across medical institutions provides new opportunities of secondary use of EHR. Issues of data-mining in large heterogeneous clinical data-sets, information retrieval and extraction in multiple medical repositories, the management of complexity and the coherent update of knowledge in medicine, clinical standards interoperability in distributed health systems and the patient Electronic Health Record (EHR) are now becoming critical to implementing enterprise and nationwide health systems.

Topic of interest will include but not limited to:

1. Data Mining, Information Extraction, and Semantic Annotation of EHR Data;

2. Medical Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

3. Expert and Clinical Decision Support Systems Using Semantic Web Technologies

4. Interoperability in Distributed healthcare Systems

5.Clinical Information Standards (e.g. HL7) Clinical Terminologies, Classifications (e.g. ICD 10) and biomedical ontologies (e.g. SNOMED - CT)

6. Patient Cohort Identification

7. Personalized Medicine via high throughput data integration

Important Dates

June 1, 2013 Letter of Intent Due (optional)

June 15, 2013 Submission Deadline

Peer-review Process

All submitted papers will go through a rigorous peer-review process with at least three reviewers. All submissions should follow the guidelines for authors available at the Methods of Information in Medicine web site (http://www.schattauer.de/fileadmin/assets/zeitschriften/methods/Instruction_to_Authors.pdf). The journal's editorial policy is also outlined on that page and will be strictly followed by special issue reviewers.

Submission Process

Optional letters of intent should be sent to guest editors by June 1, 2013. This will assist in assessing the number of likely submissions and in planning for the review process when papers are submitted. Authors must submit their papers via

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/methods. Please select “Original Article for a Focus Theme” as manuscript type and mention MIXHS as the Focus Theme in the cover letter.

Page limit is 5 pages in print per article (i.e., about 22,000 characters including space bars, please deduct 1,500 characters including space bars for each figure or table)."

Guest Editors
Matt-Mouley Bouamrane (University of Glasgow, UK)

Cui Tao (Mayo Clinic, USA)

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Information and Communication Technology: Medical Informatics and Technology

Guest Editors:

Dr. D. Jude Hemanth, Karunya University, India

Dr. Vania Vieira Estrela, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil

Medical applications such as medical image analysis are becoming increasingly important in everyday life. But the success of these methodologies is still in doubt due to the human intervention in their systems. This indirectly highlights the necessity for automation techniques for these applications, which can improve the performance to higher extent. The major problem however is that the level of usage of automation techniques is very low in these applications.

This special issue will focus on exploring the applicability of various automation techniques for medical applications. The issue will also give emphasis to innovative methodologies for applications in medical informatics. This issue will thus serve as a platform for researchers to share their ideas and present solutions for human problems in the area of medical informatics.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Medical image processing

• Biomedical signal analysis

• Information security

• Telemedicine

• Data mining

• Medical image compression

• De-noising in medical images

• Soft computing approaches

• Animation and 3-D analysis

• Medical image understanding

• Bio-sensors

• Data transmission

• Modelling and statistical analysis

• Medical image classification and segmentation

• Hardware, medical equipment

• Any other topics related to medical informatics

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online.

Important Dates

Full paper submission: 22 July, 2013

Notification to authors: 22 August, 2013

Final version submission: 30 September, 2013

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of EDM Forum: Methods for CER, PCOR, and QI Using EHR Data in a Learning Health System

The recent explosion in the availability of data from electronic health records (EHRs) has created many opportunities to conduct research that can gene rate new evidence to determine what works best for whom and under what conditions. However, translating this newly available data into meaningful research findings requires new research methods that address missing data and other data quality issues and analytic strategies that can account for granular temporal or spatial information, among others.

The EDM Forum is now accepting submissions for a special issue of eGEMs, titled, Methods for CER, PCOR, and QI Using EHR Data in a Learning Health System. Dr. Michael Stoto from Georgetown University will serve as a Guest Editor for this special issue, which will share the viewpoints of researchers developing innovative strategies to work with EHR data and develop new approaches for research and quality improvement that can improve patient outcomes.

All manuscripts must be received by June 1, 2013.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: Big Data in Healthcare and Biomedical Research

Questions Regarding the Issue

Please direct any questions regarding the special issue or submissions to Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado (machado@ucsd.edu)

Motivation

The collection, annotation, organization, integration, analysis, interpretation, governance, and sharing of big, complex, and sensitive data from healthcare and biomedical research has recently become the emphasis of several government initiatives in the USA and abroad. While the informatics community has been dealing with many of these issues for several years, the dissemination of new approaches and solutions may be scattered in several different journals, conference proceedings, and web sites. The purpose of this special focus issue is to publish the most innovative approaches and solutions (through Research and Applications articles, Brief Communications, and Case Reports), and place them in context of the work that has been previously published (through Reviews and Perspectives). User-friendly Tutorials that help non-specialists better understand the methods commonly used in machine and statistical learning, as well as in large scale integrative approaches related to common data models, ontologies and standards are also welcome.

Topics of Interest

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Scalable systems for data integration across sites

- Large scale standards-based representation and modeling of data and algorithms

- Information retrieval that combines the biomedical literature and patient data sources

- Collaborative filtering

- Adaptive learning

- Distributed multiparty computation and large scale distributed data annotation

- High performance computing and parallel processing

- Novel inferential statistics and machine learning algorithms

- Evaluation strategies

- Ethical, social, and legal considerations

- Analyses of big data from EHRs, genomes, proteomes, images, social media, patient reports, etc.

Authors should make sure to place their work in the context of biomedical research or healthcare, and to carefully review the relevant literature. Research & Applications articles, Case Studies, and Brief Communications should describe clear evaluation strategies and quantitative or qualitative results, and discuss how results could be generalized to other settings. Preference will be given to systematic Reviews. Perspectives should provide consensus of a group of experts who are highly experienced in the topic, and should demonstrate command of the existing literature, particularly recent literature whose synthesis would be new to our readers. Open-source software code and data should be submitted, as well as data when appropriate.

Important Dates

May 31, 2013 Manuscript submission deadline

July 31, 2013 (expected) Initial decisions sent to authors

August 31, 2013 (expected) Revised manuscript submission deadline

September 30, 2013 (expected) Final decisions sent to authors

Submission and Peer Review Process

To ensure consideration in the special issue, authors should note in a cover letter that their submission is for the “Special Issue on Big Data”. Detailed information for online submission to JAMIA is available via http://jamia.bmj.com.

All manuscripts will be subject to the rigorous JAMIA peer-review process. Manuscripts that are considered within scope and meet quality expectations will be typically reviewed by two experts for scientific merit. Assistance of a native English speaker is highly recommended prior to submission.

Authors should format and structure their manuscripts according to the guidelines specified at: http://jamia.bmj.com/site/about/guidelines.xhtml. Accepted articles may appear in print or in an online JAMIA issue.