HEALTH INFORMATICS and BIOINFORMATICS

37th ACM SIGAPP SAC 2022: Special Track on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics

AIM

Health Informatics is an emerging research area which deals with merging technology with medical research to provide better healthcare options to citizens of a nation. Health Informatics requires techniques and technologies to acquire, store, retrieve and use healthcare information so as to foster better collaboration between healthcare providers and patients. The most important purpose of health informatics is to deliver the effective, reliable and low cost healthcare to patients and provide information for healthcare reforms.

Bioinformatics is a closely related field where attempt is made to understand biological data from datasets which are large and complex. The focus of bioinformatics track is on computational methods related to various biological molecules and their interactions.

Motivation

U.S. National Library of Medicine defines health informatics as “the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, adoption, and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management, and planning”. Industries and governments have identified this as a thrust area for research and development. The main research in a computing perspective is to identify technology solutions to improve everyday wellness by using principles of information technology, analytics and prediction.

Scope

Though the industry and academia are working on Health Informatics, we see only a few active conferences in this area like IEEE Bio Medical Health Informatics and Body Sensor Network Conference, International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics etc. The few other conferences organised by localised agencies do not have much coverage and visibility in the worldwide research community. Health Informatics offers immense research opportunities that can improve the quality of life of people. This emerging area need due attention from the computing community so as to maximise the discussion and research progress. We feel that it is time that a worldwide professional body like ACM give focus on this area of research.

Theme

The first edition of HI track was held in SAC 2019 and was well received. This research area is multidisciplinary and the track invites papers on works that are dealing with different type of health care data like EHR data, image data, genomic data, wearable device data etc.

Focus of Health Informatics is very different and will include topics on e-health, electronic patient records; knowledge management, data and text mining and analytics; support for clinical decision-making, evidence-based practice, prediction; healthcare applications of mobile (mhealth) and pervasive digital technologies; applications of social media technologies and services; telecare and telehealth; security and confidentiality of health care data; modeling of healthcare service usage, evaluation and use of healthcare IT, barriers and enablers to adoption, design and development methodologies, innovations and future developments in healthcare technologies and applications etc.

The topics in scope for Health Informatics is quite wide and multidisciplinary. We propose to include all the important topics in Health Informatics in this track in order to cater to a wider audience. The following list includes some of the major topics that we plan to focus in this track in this year.

Health Informatics Analytics, knowledge discovery, and predictive modelling • Deep Learning approaches to build diagnostic systems • Human factors, Interface design, and user studies of health informatics applications. • m Health, e-health and Tele-medicine, wearable technologies • Internet of Things in Health care • Effective public health monitoring and handling non communicable disease • Security and Privacy of Health Care data • Interoperability of Health Care data • Epidemic Management with technology • Use of Ontology and Semantic Web to enhance Digital Health. • Transcriptomics • Proteomics • Genomics • Computational Algorithms for Bioinformatics