Telemedicine calls for papers / publications

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 Section of Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research: Smartphones, Sensors, and Social Networks: A New Age of Health Behavior Change

Submission Deadline November 30, 2012

For submission information: http://www.springer.com/medicine/journal/13142

Traditional health behavior change interventions have long been limited by high expense, patient burden, and poor adherence. As health professionals, our access to intervene upon patients’ behavior is constrained by current models of health care which limit care provision to face-to-face visits provided on a weekly schedule or less frequently. Limited access to patients limits our ability to gain an accurate understanding of the antecedents and consequences of behavior, and to intervene in the moments when patients most need help. Computing technology including mobile phones, sensors, and online social networks – by being available in real time – are being explored as ways to enhance our ability to understand health behavior and more effectively intervene upon it. mHealth, the application of mobile technology to health, has reached its tipping point. A rapidly growing body of research evidence demonstrates the efficacy of mHealth approaches across a wide range of conditions, populations, and settings. mHealth has also attracted a parallel explosion of industry attention. An extremely diverse group of companies are capitalizing on the mHealth market, which is projected to reach $23 billion in revenues by 2017. Sensing technologies are also rapidly being developed to gather behavioral, physiological, and contextual data that can then be used to predict behavior or deliver “just-in-time” interventions. Finally, online social networking, a service that allows individuals to interact and communicate with other users without geographical, physical, or logistical barriers has now been used for health surveillance, disseminating information and innovations, and health behavior intervention. The potential of these technologies to impact health behavior change has yet to be fully realized. The purpose of this special issue is to draw papers from academicians, clinicians, and industry professionals who are developing, testing, and/or researching the efficacy of these technologies for health behavior change.

Given that opportunities for academic-industry communication and collaboration have been too infrequent, we have seen relatively limited translation of evidence-based mHealth approaches into the real-world settings that are largely served by industry. We suspect that collaboration between industry and the research community might accelerate the growth of the mHealth market and improve the health of patients and populations. There are important barriers to such collaborations which we hope are explored and discussed further in this special issue. We hope to attract high quality contributions relating to the opportunities and challenges associated with stimulating academic-industry partnerships and creating evidence-based technology-based approaches to health behavior change. We acknowledge differences in the type of data that is collected by academics and industry professionals and aim to be a forum for both types of data, while acknowledging the strengths and limitations of each. Traditional research reports are sought, but also case studies characterizing real world translation efforts, implementation challenges, and academic-industry partnerships are strongly encouraged. Additionally, synopses of practical tools and strategies, applications, and approaches are of interest. Selected manuscripts will be published together with commentaries in this special section of Translational Behavioral Medicine.

Editors of the Special Section:
Sherry Pagoto, PhD, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Gary Bennett, PhD, Duke University

Editor-in-Chief:
Bonnie Spring, PhD, Northwestern University

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 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 Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology: Innovative Treatment and Prevention Programs for Pediatric Overweight and Obesity

Guest Editors: David M. Janicke, Ph.D. and Ric G. Steele, Ph.D.

Despite significant clinical research directed at the problem, obesity remains a preeminent health problem in pediatric populations in the United States and abroad. The most current epidemiological data indicate that upwards of 17% of children and adolescents are obese, and that more than 30% of children and adolescents are overweight (Ogden et al., 2010). These aggregated data mask significant health disparities across medically underserved and racially or ethnically diverse groups. Recent reviews of the literature (e.g., Kitzmann et al., 2010; Luttikhuis et al., 2009) indicate that behaviorally-based individual and family-based interventions can be efficacious, yet the literature continues to be plagued with barriers to the successful translation of efficacious studies into clinical practice. Issues such as non- or incomplete treatment adherence, non-completion of therapy, poor maintenance of treatment effects, and unknown efficacy of interventions for medically underserved or culturally diverse populations limit the applicability of the current literature to cases most often seen in practice.

Details:

The aim of this special issue is to highlight innovative approaches to the treatment or prevention of pediatric overweight and obesity. We anticipate that studies will focus on a range of topics, including, but not limited to: interventions that employ eHealth, mHealth, or telehealth technologies; intervention or prevention programs specifically designed for medically underserved or ethnically or culturally diverse samples; studies examining ecological systems-based intervention/prevention efforts such as school, or community based programs; empirical studies of policies that are designed to address obesity/overweight at the community or population level; and research examining the translation and dissemination of interventions previously demonstrated to be efficacious in clinical trials. A broad range of research methodologies will be considered for the special issue, including single case or small-n designs, randomized clinical trials, qualitative methodologies, and demonstration studies. Regardless of topic or methodology, a premium will be placed on the manuscript’s demonstration of innovation. We expect manuscripts to highlight implications of the research for practitioners and/or policy makers.

Submissions for this special issue will be accepted until October 1, 2012.

Papers should be prepared in compliance with JPP’s Instructions to Authors (http://jpepsy.oxfordjournals.org/) and submitted through the ScholarOne Manuscript Central™ submission portal (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jpepsy). Manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Papers that are not appropriate for inclusion in this special issue may be rerouted (with the authors’ knowledge and consent) for consideration for publication in JPP as regular papers. Please indicate in the cover letter accompanying your manuscript that you would like to have the paper considered for the Special Issue on Innovative Treatment and Prevention Programs for Pediatric Overweight and Obesity.

Please direct all inquiries to David M. Janicke at djanicke@phhp.ufl.edu<mailto:djanicke@phhp.ufl.edu> or Ric G. Steele at rsteele@ku.edu<mailto:rsteele@ku.edu>.

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