We cordially invite you to submit your contribution to the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2012). IHI 2012 is the main conference of the newly formed ACM Special Interest Group on Health Informatics (SIGHIT).

IHI 2012 is ACM's premier community forum concerned with the application of computer science principles, information science principles, information technology, and communication technology to address problems in healthcare, public health, and everyday wellness. The conference highlights the most novel technical contributions in computing-oriented health informatics and the related social and ethical implications. IHI 2012 will feature keynotes, a multi-track technical program including papers, demonstrations, and panels. New additions to the IHI 2012 program include tutorials and a doctoral consortium.

IHI 2012 serves as a venue for the discussion of innovative technical contributions highlighting end-to-end applications, systems, and technologies, even if available only in prototype form (e.g., a system is not deployed in production mode and/or evaluation may be performed by giving examples). We strongly encourage authors to submit their original contributions describing their algorithmic contributions, methodological contributions, and well-founded conjectures based on an application-oriented context. A paper does not have to be comprehensive and can focus on a single aspect of design, development, evaluation, or deployment.

Contributions in the realm of social and behavioral issues might include empirical studies of health-related information use and needs, socio-technical studies on the implementation and use of health information technology, studies on health informatics in the context of community impact and implications, studies on public policies on leveraging health informatics infrastructure, among others.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Specific topics of interest for this conference cover various facets of health informatics research, including but not limited to the following:

1. Information technologies for healthcare delivery and management

- Comparative effectiveness research
- Consumer health and wellness informatics applications
- E-commerce in health informatics
- Economics of health computing (e.g., cost-benefit analysis)
- E-learning for spreading health informatics awareness
- Health informatics education
- Healthcare delivery in developing countries
- Healthcare workflow management
- Information technologies for alternative medicine
- Information technologies for healthcare service delivery
- Information technologies for hospital management
- Information technologies for the management of patient safety and clinical outcomes
- Medical compliance automation for patients and institutions
- Organizational impacts of health information technologies
- Public health informatics
- Social studies of health information technologies
- Technology informatics guiding educational reform
- Telecare
- Telemedicine
- Virtual conferencing systems for healthcare

2. Health data acquisition, management, and visualization

- Continuous monitoring and streaming technologies for healthcare
- Data model for health information system
- Disease profiling and personalized treatment
- Display and visualization of medical data
- Intelligent medical devices and sensors
- Medical data management
- Medical signal acquisition, archiving, and communication
- RFID solutions for healthcare
- Technologies for capturing and documenting clinical encounter information in electronic systems
- Virtual and augmented reality for healthcare
- Virtual patients

3. Healthcare knowledge management and decision support

- Business intelligence and data warehousing for healthcare
- Cognitive and decision support systems
- Computational intelligence methodologies for healthcare
- Computational support for patient-centered and evidence-based care
- Computer support for surgical intervention
- Computer-aided diagnosis
- Healthcare knowledge abstraction, classification, and summarization
- Healthcare knowledge computerization, execution, inference, management, and representation
- Medical recommender systems
- Semantic Web, linked data, ontology, and healthcare

4. Healthcare modeling and simulation

- Biomedical modeling and simulation
- Disease diagnostic models
- Disease prognostic models
- Epidemiological modeling
- Health risk evaluation and modeling
- Operations research methods for healthcare
- Optimization models for planning and recommending therapies
- Personalized predictive modeling for clinical management (e.g., cancer, trauma, diabetes mellitus, sleep disorders, substance abuse)
- Physiological modeling

5. Data analytics, data mining, and machine learning

- Analytics for clinical care
- Biomarker discovery and biomedical model development
- Biomedical data mining
- Biomedical pattern recognition
- Cleaning, pre-processing, and ensuring quality and integrity of medical data
- Data analytics for healthcare quality assurance
- Healthcare workflow mining
- Large-scale longitudinal mining of medical records
- Medical insurance fraud detection
- Medical signal analysis and processing
- Natural language processing and text mining for biomedical literature, clinical notes, and health consumer texts
- Statistics and quality of medical data
- Survival analysis and health hazard evaluations
- Visual analytics for healthcare

6. Health information system engineering

- Acceptance testing for healthcare systems and applications
- Cloud computing for healthcare
- Database design for health information systems
- Experiences of building health information systems
- Health IT project management
- Health software architecture, framework, design, and engineering
- Health systems simulation
- High-performance computing for healthcare
- Multi-agent systems for healthcare
- System integration for healthcare
- Trustworthy and secure infrastructures for health information systems

7. Health information systems

- Applications in electronic health records
- Clinical information systems
- Consumer and clinician health information needs, seeking, sharing, and use
- Development and implementation of medical data and vocabulary standards
- Evaluation of health information systems
- E-visit system
- Health digital library
- Health information systems for chronic disease management
- Information retrieval for health applications
- Intelligent personal health records
- Issues involving interoperability and data representation in healthcare delivery
- Keyword and multifaceted search over structured electronic health records
- Open-source software for healthcare
- Pharmaco- and pharmacy informatics systems
- Privacy in healthcare
- Security in healthcare
- System software for clinical studies and translational research

8. Healthcare communication networks and environments

- Assistive and adaptive ubiquitous computing technologies for healthcare
- Collaboration technologies for healthcare
- Computer games for healthcare
- E-communities, social networks, and social media for patients and caregivers
- Health portals
- Healthcare communication system performance and adaptability
- Peer-to-peer networks for healthcare
- Sensor networks and systems for pervasive healthcare
- Social media analysis and mining for healthcare applications

9. Interactions with health information technologies

- Accessibility and Web-enabled technologies for healthcare
- Affective computing for healthcare
- Automated generation of textual document and multimedia content for healthcare
- Biological effects of medical devices
- Bio-surveillance
- Communication interventions between patients and care providers
- Consumer health literacy, numeracy, and graphicacy
- Human factors (ergonomics) in health information systems
- Medical biometrics
- Medical robotics
- Physiological computing (e.g., brain computer interface)
- Speech, gesture, and handwriting acquisition and recognition for healthcare
- Usability studies in healthcare
- User-interface design for medical devices and health software