Patient Safety calls for papers / publications

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine:Evaluation of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in Health Care

Guest Editors:
Elske Ammenwerth, UMIT, Hall in Tirol, Austria
Nicolette de Keizer, University of Amsterdam, Dept Medical Informatics, The Netherlands
Michael Rigby, Keele University, U.K.
Pirkko Nykänen, Tampere University

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in Health Care have a long history going back to the 1970s, with recent reviews showing that their number and uptake increases. CDSS can support many different activities such as diagnosis, therapy, monitoring or prevention and are used in all kinds of medical domains such as chronic illness, acute care, primary care, and patient advice lines. CDSS may provide many different services such as access to knowledge, statistical calculations and individual adaptations, recommendations, reminders or alerts to different user groups including physicians and nurses but also addressing self-management by patients. In some areas, CDSS have been found to increase clinical performance and guidelines adherence, while evidence on improvement of patient outcome is still limited. There are even examples of negative impact. Overall, the number of published CDSS evaluation studies is still limited given their` rising uptake, and the evaluation design and/or reporting of the evaluation studies is often weak, which makes judgment of their cost-benefit ratio difficult.

The momentum surrounding CDSS is even more increasing with the more widespread implementation of electronic patient records enabling CDSS implementation; however health care providers and organizations and development agencies require more intensive evaluation and research for better informed investments, to ensure patient safety, and to recognize clinician anxieties as to their professional liability. Evidence from early CDSS deployments should be informing and guiding subsequent projects to ensure that ineffective approaches are not duplicated and early successes can be replicated and scaled. Building up such an evidence base requires reproducible and well designed evaluation studies of CDSS. Guidelines for evaluation of health informatics interventions in general and their reporting are available although these need to be adapted and extended for the specific case of CDSS evaluation. Also the updated EU Medical Device Directive now defines "medical” software a medical device. This has implications for the way CDSS are developed and evaluated. Safety for patients, users and others is a key aspect of the evaluation of CDSS in the context of the Medical Device Directive.

As with any aspect of healthcare, policies and practice should be firmly based on evidence, and informatics should be no exception. Evaluation of systems is a robust source of such evidence, provided the evaluation is scientific. Whilst generic guidelines now exist for health informatics systems evaluation, application within CDSS is limited, not least because of the methodological issues arising, especially for pilot studies preceding wider general roll-out. In particular, user populations may be dispersed and hard to reach, user profiles and patterns of use are important factors and patient (and organizational) outcomes are hard to track. This special issue will give opportunity to focus on these challenges.

Topics for the special issue
We are inviting people from health care, academia and industry to submit original articles or systematic reviews relevant to the following topics:

Case studies on evaluation of CDSS
Meta analyses or systematic reviews on CDSS
Methodology of CDSS evaluation
Verification, Validiation and testing of CDSS
Impact of CDSS
Costs of CDSS
CDSS and patient safety
Barriers and challenges to CDSS implementation and evaluation
User acceptance and usability of CDSS
Adoption of CDSS in health care environments
Issue of "brittleness” of CDSS
Quality indicators for CDSS
Certification of CDSS
Future of CDSS evaluation

Deadline of submissions:
Deadline for the submission of manuscripts is June 30th, 2012.

We advise all authors interested to contribute to this special issue to contact Elske Ammenwerth beforehand (contact data see below) to indicate the topic of the planned manuscript.

Instruction for authors:
Please consult the Guide for Authors of AIIM available at the journal homepage at: http://ees.elsevier.com/aiim/

The length of manuscripts should not exceed 20 – 25 manuscript pages (1.5-spaced lines).

When submitting the paper, please use the Electronic Manuscript Submission at http://ees.elsevier.com/aiim/

Clearly indicate that it is a submission to the special issue by adding "Special Issue: CDSS Evaluation” to the title of the manuscript.

All papers are refereed through an international peer review process by at least three reviewers.

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine carries no page charges.

The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail or, alternatively, 25 free paper offprints. See instructions for authors for details.

Contact:
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elske Ammenwerth
Eduard Wallnöfer Zentrum 1
UMIT – University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology
Institute of Medical Informatics
6060 Hall in Tyrol
Austria
Mail elske.ammenwerth@umit.athttp://iig.umit.at

Call for Papers for a Theme Issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research: Internet of Things: Towards a Mobile and Ubiquitous Healthcare and Prevention

The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) is the leading international peer-reviewed and open access journal dealing with issues related to health, health care and medicine in the Internet age.

JMIR is the most cited journal on medical informatics, according to the Thompson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (JCR) index, with an Impact Factor of 4.7.

The evolution of the Internet towards the Future Internet with IPv6, Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks (e.g. 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi), mobile computing (e.g. smart phones, tablets), as well as the capabilities for global and uniqueness identification of objects (e.g. RFID, NFC), are making it feasible to identify, sense, locate, and connect people, machines, devices and everyday equipment.

These new capabilities to link Internet with everyday devices, forms of identification and communication among people and things, and exploitation of data capture, define the so-called Internet of things. This is opening an opportunity not only to extend the current e-Health approaches to a more pervasive and mobile healthcare prevention, by connecting citizens’/patients’ clinical and everyday devices to the Internet, but also to interconnect them with clinical platforms through the advantages from technologies such as smart clinical devices and wireless technologies. Furthermore, new identification and tracking solutions are being defined for hospital equipment, and new smart knowledge-based algorithms are developed to support personalized decision-making in the health and home care sector. Additionally, their applications in supplementary sectors such as pharmaceutical, in order to improve drug compliance and avoid adverse drugs reactions.

The objective of this issue is to report high quality research on recent advances developed in various aspects of e-health, more specifically the state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies, and systems in the design, development, deployment, and innovative use of the technologies, tools, and applications from the Future Internet of Things, People and Services for healthcare and prevention. We invite authors to submit their original papers and contributions addressing (but not limited to) the following topics:

-- Medical communications, protocols, standards and interoperability
-- Personal healthcare informatics solutions
-- Wireless Sensor Networks technologies for e-Health (e.g. 6LoWPAN/Bluetooth/WiFi)
-- Sensor technologies for e-Health and personal healthcare (e.g. ISO/IEEE 11073)
-- Identification technologies for e-Health, surgical and medical systems (e.g. QR/RFID/NFC)
- Wearable and continuous health monitoring
-- e-Health service management (e.g. Web of Things)
-- Elderly homecare, Tele-health, and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
-- Usability and HCI interfaces based on mobile computing and the Internet of Things
-- Personal Health Record, Information Systems, and Knowledge-Based Solutions
-- Global Healthcare and Citizens’ Prevention
-- Medication adherence, clinical guideline compliance and pharmaceutical applications
-- Tools and techniques to design, implement, and deploy IoT solutions
-- Mobile computing and Ubiquitous Healthcare applications
-- Living labs and field trials with the Internet of Things technologies

SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the format and instructions hereto defined in the (www.jmir.org/cms/view/Instructions_for_Authors:Instructions_for_Authors_of_JMIR), and submitted through the Web-Based Manuscript Submission and Tracking System. When submitting, select section “Theme Issue on Internet of Things: Towards Mobile and Ubiquitous Healthcare and Prevention”, in the manuscript type to indicate that the paper is intended for this theme issue.

An OPEN CALL for submissions is issued. In addition, the best papers from the International Workshop on Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) will be invited to submit a manuscript. For further information, see www.esiot.com.

All contributions will be peer reviewed. As JMIR is an open access journal, authors publish their work under a creative commons license and keep the copyright. Articles will be freely accessible on the JMIR site and will be available in open access archives such as Pubmedcentral.gov.

These articles will be indexed in more than 20 bibliographic databases and abstracting services, including Medline, CINAHL, Information Science Abstracts, INSPEC (Institution of Electrical Engineers), Communication Abstracts, The Informed Librarian Online, LISA, EMBASE, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, PsycINFO, LISTA (Library / Information Sciences & Technology Abstracts), ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts) database, CSA Social Services Abstracts database, Pubmed Central, and other databases and abstraction services. Publication costs (APF: article processing fee) for copyediting, and typesetting must be covered by the authors.

TIMELINE AND DEADLINES
-- DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: December 15th, 2012
-- PUBLICATION: The publication is scheduled to end 2013/beginning 2014

EDITOR-in-Chief
Gunther Eysenbach MD, MPH, FACMI.
Editor & Publisher, Journal of Medical Internet Research
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

RECOMMENDATION: before submit your paper be awareness that JMIR is not an engineering journal, and it will not be published overly technical papers with no real-live application and a thorough evaluation. Therefore, it is required high-quality research articles with technical background, but this also should have a health angle, and an evaluation in hospitals, clinics, living labs, patient‟s homes, residencies, or Ambient Assisted Living scenarios.

For further information, please contact the Guest Editors or the Editor-in-Chief

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management: Learning from Experience and Event Analysis Methods for Improved Safety

Guest Editor:
Dr. Wim J.J. Van Wassenhove, MINES Paristech, France

This special issue will highlight recent progress, ideas, problems and solutions relating to the multifaceted methods of learning from experience and accident analysis.

Learning from experience is far more than just an event and accident analysis method. It concerns data collection methods, different analysis methods, the implementation of databases to store information, and reuse of the information gathered and the lessons learned (for instance in training sessions). In an organisation, the learning from experience process is also affected by a wide range of sociocultural factors; it therefore interacts closely with the safety culture of the organisation.

One the other hand, accident analysis methods are based on an accident meta-model and this approach frames the results of the analysis. They also differ in the emphasis they place on technological, human or organisational aspects.

This issue is intended for academics, practitioners, scientists and engineers involved in the areas of business, economics, scientific and technological disciplines, energy industries, environmental and ecological systems, safety, public health and medical services.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

Learning from experience methods
Learning from safety events
Organisational learning processes
Safety training
Accident analysis methods
Events investigation
Accident models and meta models
Case studies and event databases

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 was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 1 June, 2012
Notification of acceptance: 1 August, 2012
Final version due: 1 October, 2012

All papers must be submitted online.

The Journal of Emergency Nursing is looking for manuscripts particularly for the topics listed below, but is interested in any papers related to emergency nursing and emergency patient care.

-- Advanced Practice Issues
-- Cardiology
o Cardiac Arrhythmia Management in Emergency Care
o Management of Cardiac Problems
o Medications (including review of old and new medications)
o Protocols
o Management of Technological Cardiac Problems in the Emergency
Department (for example, LVAD)
-- Caring for Victims of Torture
-- Case Studies
-- The Challenges of Emergency Nursing and the Aging Workforce
-- Clinical Articles
-- Clinical Nurse Specialist Issues and Interests
-- Continuing Education Challenges
-- Critical Care Issues in the Emergency Department
-- Current Trends in Emergency Care Treatments: some examples
o Wound care
o Splinting
o Resuscitation
o Sepsis
-- “Cutting Edge” Procedures
-- Dealing with Cultural Diversity
-- EKG Interpretation
-- Emergency Care Policy and Advocacy

-- Emergency Management
-- Emergency Nurse Practitioner Roles and Cases
-- Emergency Nursing Pearls
-- Emerging Issues in Emergency Healthcare
-- Endocrinology Emergencies
o Diabetic Emergencies
o Diabetes Evaluation in the Emergency Department
-- Forensic Nursing
-- Geriatric Issues
-- How to Write for Publication
-- Implementation of Patient Care Standards
-- Infection Control in the Emergency Department
-- Information on Charging, Coding
-- Information on Use of Fast Tracks and Urgent Care Units
-- Injury Prevention Programs
-- International Emergency Nursing Practice
-- JCAHO Standards and How to Implement Them in the Emergency Department
-- Lab Value Interpretation
-- Leadership Topics
o What it Takes to be a Leader
o Leadership Examples
-- Legal Practice Issues
-- Legislative Updates: What Have You Done in Your City, State?
-- Lessons Learned from and Solutions Developed for Specific Emergency Department Situations
-- Management Issues
o Staffing
o Recruitment and Retention
--Management of the Patient with a Psychiatric Emergency
-- Military Emergency Nursing/Deployed Nursing
-- Nursing Exemplars
-- Obstetrics and Gynecological Emergencies
-- Orientation and Competency Training and Evaluation
-- Patient Assessment in the Emergency Department
-- Patient Flow Issues
-- Patient Safety Issues Specific to the Emergency Department
-- Pediatric Care and Challenges in the Emergency Department
-- Prehospital Issues
-- Protocols and Guidelines
-- Research Related to Emergency Nursing and Emergency Practice
-- Safety Stories (near misses and lessons learned)
-- Sexual Assault Issues, SANE Articles
-- Trauma Care and Patient Management
-- Use of Specific Equipment and its Application to Practice (in other words, does it work?)
-- Volunteer Experiences

If interested, please contact Reneé Holleran, JEN Editor, at
RHolleran@ena.org

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Medical Data Streams

An Elsevier Journal

Many artificial intelligence researchers coming from different areas (data mining, machine learning, intelligent data analysis, pattern recognition, fuzzy logic, databases, etc.) design new approaches or adapt some of the traditional algorithms to data streams. In many medical applications different domain experts, e.g. physicians (would) benefit from the integration of the streaming medical data into decision support systems.

The goal of this special issue is to gather researchers who deal with artificial intelligence for data processing, data management and knowledge discovery in clinical scenarios where data is produced as a continuous stream.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 18 Jun 2012 *
Review notification: 18 Sept 2012
Revised submission: 18 Nov 2012
Second notification: 18 Dec 2012
Camera-ready submission: 18 Jan 2013

* earlier submissions are welcome; review process will start immediately after submission

RATIONALE

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine is facing a new challenge, created by the rapid growth in information science and technology in general and the complexity and volume of data in particular. Medical settings are using sensors and networks of health information systems to integrate data from patients, which requires storage, processing and management operators to enable further analysis and knowledge discovery. The main issue is that this data production often takes the form of high-speed continuous flows of data.

Medical domains include several settings where data is produced in a streaming fashion, such as anatomical and physiological sensors, or incidence records and health information systems. New services appear allowing users to store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. Medical data streams have become widespread and call for development of intelligent tools for making use of these data. Decision support, alerting services, ambient intelligence, assisted leaving and personalization services are just few examples of expected uses of actionable knowledge extracted from medical data streams. All of them are characterized by the high-speed at which huge amounts of data are produced, and often require fast and accurate information retrieval and analysis, that can effectively support clinical decisions.

Dealing with continuous, and possibly infinite, flows of data require different approaches for data processing and management, and further machine learning and knowledge discovery. Particular issues to address include summarization of infinite data, incremental and decremental learning, resource-awareness, real-time monitoring of changes and recurrences, etc. This is an incremental task that requires incremental algorithms that integrate very large data bases in medical domains. Streaming artificial intelligence is increasingly important in the research community, as new algorithms are needed to process medical data in reasonable time.

Furthermore, medical domains introduce extra peculiarities to the problem. For example, health information systems now deal with heterogeneous data sources, possibly distributed across health-care institutions. Moreover, this data integration requirement yields privacy-preserving issues. At the same time, it forces the system to take time, resources, and costs into consideration. Currently, generic techniques for intelligent analysis and learning from streaming data include also processing and management techniques which are widely spread in the applied computing research community. Also, in the medical domain, technological issues of data collection and storage, access, integration, information fusion, etc are also widely studied in the health informatics research community. However, adoption and development of tailored techniques for medical stream mining and clinical decision support is still to come.

The goal of this special issue is to present cutting-edge research from experts in data stream processing interested in medical applications and medical domain experts interested in timely analysis of their data streams for clinical decision support.

TOPICS

Topics include but are not restricted to processing, managing and knowledge discovery for:
Anatomical or physiological sensor data streams
Data streams in health-care
Integrating biomedical signals and electronic health records
Integrated health information data streams
Adaptive health information systems
Medical data stream models
Mobile and ubiquitous medical data streams
Data quality in medical data streams
Data streams integration in intensive care units
Remote monitoring of patients in hospital and ambulatory settings
Process mining from medical data streams
Case reports of medical scenarios where data is produced in a stream
Real-time and real-world applications using streaming medical data
Languages and ontologies for medical stream query
Integration with real-time enactment of clinical guidelines
Privacy and security issues in medical data streams

SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS

Pedro Pereira Rodrigues - LIAAD & Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Portugal
Mykola Pechenizkiy - Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Mohamed Medhat Gaber - University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Carolyn McGregor - University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
João Gama - LIAAd & Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Portugal

PAPER FORMATTING, SUBMISSION AND REVIEWING

Authors should follow the guide to authors available at AIIM website to format their article. Please note that, for the initial submission, only PDF format of submissions is allowed. Papers to this special issue should be submitted by email to the guest editors at pprodrigues@med.up.pt and not via the online Elsevier Editorial System.

Each paper submission will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. The quest editors will screen the submissions for eligibility and quality. Special issue articles should report on significant previously unpublished work.

We do invite authors to submit their revised and substantially extended workshop and conference papers. As a rule of thumb the journal paper submission should contain at least 30% of new previously unpublished material. Please indicate in your cover letter whether the journal paper submission is based on or extend substantially a previously published conference or workshop paper, in case of which a description of what is new must be clarified in the submission.

All papers accepted to the special issue are subject to the final approval by the Editor-in-Chief of AIIM journal. It is planned that the articles will appear in one of the issues of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Journal, edited and published by Elsevier, in 2013. AIIM typically has 9 issues per year.

Call for Authors: EMPSF Forum, a Quarterly Electronic Newsletter Published by the Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation

The Emergency Medicine Patient Safety Foundation publishes a quarterly electronic newsletter called the EMPSF Forum. A hard copy of the Forum is printed in the fall and is distributed at the ACEP Scientific Assembly and other conferences including the EMPSF Annual Patient Safety Summit. EMPSF is looking for authors to write articles of interest to emergency department practitioners, nurses, emergency medical services, pharmacists and others in the area of patient safety in emergency care.

Areas of particular interest include, see added topics below:

Handoffs
Boarding
Overcrowding
Patient flow
Medication safety
Communication
Workplace violence
Disruptive behavior
Fatigue
Teamwork
Equipment issues and safe design
Human factor engineering
Falls
MRI safety
Safety of culture
Safe injection practices
Radiology reports
Behavioral health patients boarded in the ED
Preventing unnecessary readmissions and visits to the ED
Discharge instructions and other safe practices
Emergency Medical Services
Telemedicine
Summary of information in the area of patient safety, legal, or risk that would be of interest to emergency department staff including ED nurses and physicians.

To be accepted articles must:

have proper permission if submitting as a reprint
be technically accurate
be based on evidenced based research
adhere to the American Medical Association style guidelines
summarize important events, guidelines, toolkits, or standards of care of interest to emergency department staff

Articles should be double spaced, excluding references, charts, and figures. There is no guarantee that all submissions will be published. EMPSF reserves the right to select articles that best fit with their mission and vision. All articles are subject to editing. Articles are copyrighted by EMPSF. Submissions can be made to the following

Sue Dill Calloway
Chief Learning Officer
614 791-1468
sdill1@columbus.rr.com