MedInfo 2001, Vol. 84 Book

As we are in the year 2002, the concept of a "networked global health" society is progressively becoming a reality. Technology barriers to connectivity, storage, and interfaces are fading while planet-wide networks are rapidly developing. The explosion of health and biomedical information, such as that produced by the unlocking of the human genetic code, can be counter-balanced by the availability of distributed and generally accessible knowledge banks. The need both for disease prevention and for continuity of care for chronic disease, coupled with severe economic pressures, has pushed various health sectors to collaborate to find optimal solutions, often crossing international boundaries. Developments in Health Informatics are accordingly progressing at great speed. As a consequence, there is a need for a broad overview of the field. This book, with an international collection of papers, provides and updated perspective on medical informatics in the new era. Bringing together scientific papers by top medical informatics researchers from around the world, this collection provides a broad overview of medical informatics for researchers and students in health related areas as well as for those in computer science, cognitive science and biomedical informatics. This book will also be of interest to clinicians, nurses and other health care professionals, as well as to health educators and administrators. Because health care workers are increasingly dealing with information systems to support patient care, research, education, and the assessment of the quality and character of care, this book can serve as an overview of the rapidly developing field of technology in global health care. Thevolume is organized into seventeen chapters covering topics such as human-computer interaction, information management, decision support, hospital information systems, imaging, bioinformatics,education and training, security and confidentiality, and evaluation. The topics and issues span all practical and theoretical, as well as empirical, aspects of medical informatics in global health