ICST Transactions on e-Health (ISSN: 2032-9296)

Description

It is widely acknowledged that pressures such as treatment advances, increasing chronic disease burden of an ageing population, and a falling carer-support ratio render many of the current healthcare provision models unsustainable. It is recognized that information and communications technology (ICT) is fundamental to enabling changes in the way services can be delivered and the outcomes that can be achieved. However, health is perhaps the last of the information intensive industries to adopt ICT on an integrated industry-wide basis. ICT enables more care to be delivered at home, helping to contain health costs by reducing demand for more expensive hospital care. It also provides a safer and less stressful environment for many patients. Patients and Citizens are taking an increasingly active role in managing their own health and well-being, through seeking medical information, monitoring their physiological parameters, and participating in activity programs. E-health, an emerging research discipline of pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology in healthcare, is a very important component in addressing these requirements.
Scope

This new journal of ICST Transactions on e-Health will focus on the emerging issues on the following topics:
1. Privacy, trust and security ? electronic patient records, models for trust and privacy, novel mobile encryption technologies, Identity federation, role based access control, single sign on, privacy enhancing technologies. Privacy legislation updates on current implementation achievements and challenges. Professional Confidentiality and Trust. What ethical and legal obligations must be considered?
2. Epidemiology and early warning systems and outbreak detection ? information and IT support systems for early warning and outbreak detection programs, data management issues, data collection
3. Healthcare ontologies and knowledge management systems ? annotation, healthcare ontologies, coding standards, communication standards, quality tagging and quality of service, distribution issues, coding systems and ontologies mapping, search, users customisation, alert agents
4. e-Learning, educational games and the impact of information delivery to patients and professionals ? using digital libraries in building on-line communities, chat rooms, moderated discussion groups, qualitative and quantitative evaluation studies, user attitude towards the knowledge, studies of changes of user attitude with respect to digital libraries
5. Web 2.0/3.0 in healthcare and on-line communities of practice ? Implementation of social networking platforms for the well-being of the patients, improved patient knowledge sharing using online communities, electronic patient kiosks, collaborative surgery using on-line tools
6. Benefits and challenges with implementation of process standards ? There are several challenges faced due to lack of standards in healthcare models. Issues around identifying some common standards and policies for next generation healthcare will be valuable to the healthcare community
Keywords

electronic patient records, virtual social networking in healthcare, wearable sensors, telemedicine, outbreak detection, digital imaging, healthcare standards, teleprevention, teleepidemiology, e-trials
Editors-in-Chief
Dr. Raj Muttukrishnan is the assistant dean for e-Learning at City University London. He has been actively pursuing research in the area of security and privacy in pervasive healthcare and leads the mobile networks research group at City University London. Prior to joining City University London he has worked for Logica UK for several years as IT consultant. He is also the chief technology officer of ElaraMed and Goquo limited. He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Electronic healthcare and International Journal of software architectures. He is a senior member of IEEE USA and the Business Chair for the ICST’s Science for Innovation and Business/Technology Council. He is also a member of the organizing committee of the ICST Pervasive Health and e-Health conference series. His groups scientific innovation in next generation mobile authentication protocol is well received within the academic and industrial community.
Dr. Patty Kostkova is a Senior Research Fellow and the head of City eHealth Research Centre (CeRC) at City University, London, UK. She has built CeRC into a thriving multidisciplinary research centre collaborating with partners including EC, ECDC and WHO. Recently, she has been appointed a consultant at WHO, ECDC and Foundation Merieux; the Scientific and General Chair of the e-Health 2009 congress, Scientific Co-Chair of e-Health 2010 and a Advisory Board member on the ECDC Knowledge Management Working Group. Regular keynote speaker at prestigious institutions and conferences, Patty published over 70 technical papers, book chapter and edited a number of journals including the “ICST Transactions on e-Health”.
Editorial Board
Sir Jonathan Michael
Deputy Healthcare Director, British Telecommunications, UK
Kevin Dean
Healthcare Director, Cisco, USA
Prof. Iain Buchan
Professor of Public Health, Manchester Medical School, University of Manchester, UK
Prof. David Ingram
University College, London, UK
Prof. Georges De Moor
School of Medicine, Ghent University, Belgium
Prof. Wendy Currie
University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Harini Kulatunga
Logica, UK
Dr. L. Witkamp
KSYOS TeleMedical Centre, Amsterdam
Prof. Harald Korb
Vitaphone, Germany
Prof. Dhiren Patel
Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India
Prof. Rajanish Dass
Indian Institute of Management, India
Dr. Raquel Gilaberte
University of Zaragoza, Spain
Dr. Cecil O. Lynch, MD, MS
UC Davis, Davis, California
Dr. Henrik Errikson
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Floriana Grasso
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK