Special Issue "Public Health Informatics"

Guest Editor
Dr. Maged N. Kamel Boulos
Faculty of Health, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, UK
Website: http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/mnkamelboulos
E-Mail: mnkamelboulos@plymouth.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1752 586530
Interests: medical and health informatics; including telehealthcare/eHealth; geographic informatics; 3D virtual worlds and virtual globes (mirror worlds); web 2.0; e-learning

Public Health Informatics (PHI) is the science of applying information-age technology to serve the specialized needs of public health. PHI is ¡°the systematic application of information and computer science and technology to public health practice, research and learning.¡± As a discipline, PHI focuses on the information science and technology applications that are relevant to public health, while always keeping in mind that:

- The primary focus of public health is to promote the health of populations and not the health of specific individuals.
- The primary strategy of public health is prevention of disease and injury by altering the conditions or the environment that put populations at risk.
- Public health professionals explore the potential for prevention at all vulnerable points in the causal chains leading to disease, injury, or disability; public health activities are not restricted to particular social, behavioural, or environmental contexts.
- Public health interventions must reflect the governmental context in which public health is practiced.

We are using the broadest definition of Public Health Informatics, which also covers applications, systems, services and solutions with noticeable impacts on communities (including patient communities, older populations, etc.) and/or on health and social care systems and services. Prospective authors are invited to submit manuscripts on related topics, including, but not limited to, Internet-based public education and outreach; telehealthcare and domotic services for populations with special needs; real-time outbreak and disease surveillance; Internet-based engagement and empowerment of citizens and communities, including Social Web applications; e-epidemiology; privacy-preserving solutions for public health studies that involve person-identifiable data (e.g., home addresses), etc.

• - free for readers, with low publishing fees paid by authors or their institutions
• Rapid publication: accepted papers are immediately published online (we started to publish papers quickly since September 2008). The printed edition will only be continued for the Proceedings of the yearly International Symposiums on Recent Advances in Environmental Health Research starting 2009.

Submission

The Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601) was launched in 2004 and is an Open Access journal, with the main Editorial Office located in Basel, Switzerland. It has been accepted for coverage in Science Citation Index Expanded, available as the Web of Science and in Current Contents/Agriculture, Biology, and Environmental Sciences. Coverage will begin with the 2009 issues. This journal is also abstracted and indexed very rapidly by Chemical Abstracts, MedLine/PubMed and EMBASE. The IJERPH maintains a rapid editorial procedure and a rigorous peer-review system. Well written papers have been peer-reviewed and published in less than 4 weeks from manuscript submission. All papers published in IJERPH have DOI numbers.

All papers should be submitted to ijerph@mdpi.com with copy to the guest editor. To be published continuously until the deadline and papers will be listed together at this special issue website.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a paper. Open Access publication fees are 300 CHF per paper. English correction fees (250 CHF) will be added in certain cases (550 CHF per paper for those papers that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections).

• real-time outbreak and disease surveillance
• disease surveillance
• Internet-based engagement and empowerment of citizens and communities
• Internet-based public health education and outreach
• e-epidemiology
• privacy-preserving solutions for public health studies that involve person-identifiable data