Quality Improvement calls for papers / publications

Call for Papers on the Topic of the Governance of Emergency Medicine for a Special Issue of the Clinical Governance: An International Journal

Clinical Governance: An International Journal is seeking contributions for a special issue on the theme of the governance of emergency medicine, to be published towards the end of 2012 or early in 2013.

The theme is inspired by a recent conference, hosted by the International Federation for Emergency Medicine.

Nick Harrop will be the editor of this special issue. Nick has over 30 years experience of emergency medicine.

We are seeking articles on topics such as:

• Patients’ perspectives on the quality of emergency healthcare and emergency medicine,
• International Standards for emergency healthcare and emergency medicine,
• Quality perspectives from the developing world,
• Critical perspectives on best practice development.

All submissions will be subject to CGIJ's usual reviewing policy. If you would like to join our panel of reviewers please contact agillies@emeraldinsight.com.

The editors would welcome enquiries from potential authors in advance of submission on suitability and scope.

Key Dates
31 Jan 2011 Call announced
30 June 2012 Latest date at which submissions will be considered for the special issue.
31 August 2012 Latest date by which papers accepted in principle after review will be returned to the authors for revisions for inclusion in the special issue
31 October 2012 Latest date by which papers accepted for inclusion in the special issue must be returned by authors with revisions completed
Late 2012/early 2013 Special Issue published

The Editors will be happy to publish papers that meet the reviewing criteria but miss the deadline at a later date in a standard issue.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association: Recovery-Oriented Practice in Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing

Guest Editors:
Kris A. McLoughlin,DNP, APRN, PMH-CNS, BC, CADC-II
Mary D. Moller DNP, ARNP, APRN, PMHCNS-BC, CPRP, FAAN

DEADLINE for article submission: AUGUST 1, 2012

In a 2005 Mental Health Declaration for Europe, the World Health Organization identified the need to “design and implement…mental health systems that promote…recovery.” According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National Consensus Statement, Recovery is cited as the “single most important goal” for the mental health service delivery system (2006). Most recently, on December 22, 2011 the SAMHSA announced a new working definition of recovery as “A process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential”. Four major dimensions that support a life in recovery include health, home, purpose, and community along with 10 guiding principles: hope; person-driven; holistic; peer support; relationship and social networks; culturally-based and influenced; importance of addressing trauma; involving friends, family, community strengths, and responsibility; respect; and, the need for many pathways for recovery to occur.

The American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA) is one of five national participants in a SAMHSA initiative to transform the concepts of recovery from a set of beliefs to recovery-oriented nursing practices. As a profession, psychiatric-mental health nursing focuses on the person with the disease or disorder (not the disease or disorder itself). We assist people, through recovery-oriented interventions to adapt to their world and find personal meaning and purpose in their own real-life experiences as community members. This special issue will focus on the state of the science: How Psychiatric Nursing is understanding, integrating and developing recovery-practices and programs; and, how these practices affect outcomes.

Manuscript submission may include, but are not limited to:

Innovative recovery-oriented program development
Development, implementation, and evaluation of recovery-oriented practices or components of recovery practice
First-person accounts of recovery practice and related outcomes

Data-based manuscripts, quality improvement studies, state of the science / systematic literature reviews preferred. All manuscripts should be translational in nature by including key practice points for psychiatric nurses that can be implemented in the institutional or community healthcare setting.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology: Using Technology to Facilitate Chronic Disease Management

Guest Editors:
Khin Than Win, University of Wollongong, Australia
Nilmini Wickramasinghe, RMIT University, Australia

Chronic disease continues to be one of the leading causes of death and economic loss in most countries today. Hence, it has become a central problem for healthcare and many are looking for solutions.

Early detection and prevention of chronic disease is one of the preferred strategies for reducing the incidence of chronic disease and address escalating cost issues. It has been widely documented that assisting chronic disease management through information technology tends to facilitate better health outcomes. We are therefore seeing several health IT projects being initiated and successfully supporting chronic disease management.

This special issue aims to host a discussion and discourse on the possible applications of IS/IT (information systems/information technology) to facilitate better chronic disease management.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

Facilitating standardisation via including care plans and guidelines for health information systems and developing decision support systems for assisting healthcare providers' decision making

Technology for delivery of care, e.g. artificial pancreases, implants, telemedicine, radiology, smart devices such as insulin pumps and implants

Electronic health records; health information systems; computerised guidelines; prevention; patient education; care and assistance for elderly people; lifestyle modifications such as physical activities, nutrition, weight management and mental health

Design and development of portals, communication platforms and/or the role of online social networks

Applications for mobile solutions to facilitate monitoring and/or management

Specific technology solutions to address better monitoring and management of asthma, diabetes, congenital heart disease, arthritis, chronic pain and obesity

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

Papers due: 20 October, 2012

Review results: 31 January, 2013

Final paper due: 20 April 2013

Editors and Notes

You may send one copy in the form of an MS Word or PDF file attached to an email (details in Author Guidelines) to the following:

Dr. Khin Than Win
University of Wollongong
Faculty of Informatics
Northfields Avenue
Wollongong, NSW 2522
Australia
Email: win@uow.edu.au

Prof. Nilmini Wickramasinghe
Epworth Chair Health Information Management
RMIT University
College of Business
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne, VIC 3001
Australia
E-mail: nilmini.wickramasinghe@rmit.edu.au

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the names of the Guest Editors

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.