Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management

 

Special Issue on: "Pervasive Healthcare"

Guest Editors:
Professor William Buchanan, Napier University, UK and Dr Christoph Thuemmler, MD, Western Isles Hospital, UK

Overall, the healthcare industry is often seen as a chaotic structure, where it is difficult to map healthcare processes onto formal models. This special edition aims to identify and discuss useable models for new emerging patient care strategies within a changing healthcare environment, so that IT systems can be effectively designed around the patient, rather than, as in most cases, where healthcare systems are designed around the healthcare practitioners. This type of approach is key as it will allow a paradigm shift away from rigid centralised hospital dominated healthcare systems towards a more flexible distributed patient centred service. Upcoming ubiquitous and pervasive technologies will help to transform static on demand provider defined care patterns into need driven highly dynamic personalised interventions.

In order to deliver the right service in time, heterogeneous multimedia information from distributed sources needs to be processed much faster in order to be integrated into an enhanced digital patient model. Along with enhanced models of patients, the special edition focuses on enhanced methods of security within healthcare systems, such as ones based around roles within a healthcare environment. This might identify healthcare roles around the patient, and the events, properties, procedures, and so on, which effectively define a patient’s environment, and to fully integrate security from a core level. Most existing healthcare systems are typically seen as centralised systems, thus this issue also aims to investigate methodologies which allow the distribution of data around wide areas, and in the creation of systems which are robust, but also allow for enhanced security.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Distributed, patient-centric healthcare models and the challenge of population shifts and demographic changes
• The challenge of delivering healthcare in remote areas
• Bridging the information gap between different sectors of care
• Modelling, measuring and monitoring
• Security practices in healthcare systems.
• Enhanced tracking methods.
• Assisted living - intelligent houses
• Agent-based systems
• Novel strategies for data mining and information distribution
• Ethical issues arising from the appliance of pervasive computing in healthcare.

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

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

Deadline for submission: 31 July 2007