http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/pubhealth-informatics/ 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). http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/5/2177/ Mapping medical knowledge into a relational database became possible with the availability of personal computers and user-friendly database software in the early 1990s. To create a database of medical knowledge, the domain expert works like a mapmaker to first outline the domain and then add the details, starting with the most prominent features. The resulting "intelligent database" can support the decisions of healthcare professionals. The intelligent database described in this article contains profiles of 275 infectious diseases. Users can query the database for all diseases matching one or more specific criteria (symptom, endemic region of the world, or epidemiological factor). Epidemiological factors include sources (patients, water, soil, or animals), routes of entry, and insect vectors. Medical and public health professionals could use such a database as a decision-support software tool. http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/5/2177/ Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 CEST International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2010-05-04 7 5 Article 2177 2190 1660-4601 Using a Relational Database to Index Infectious Disease Information 2010-05-04 doi: 10.3390/ijerph7052177 Brown http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/2/596/ Text and structural data mining of web and social media (WSM) provides a novel disease surveillance resource and can identify online communities for targeted public health communications (PHC) to assure wide dissemination of pertinent information. WSM that mention influenza are harvested over a 24-week period, 5 October 2008 to 21 March 2009. Link analysis reveals communities for targeted PHC. Text mining is shown to identify trends in flu posts that correlate to real-world influenza-like illness patient report data. We also bring to bear a graph-based data mining technique to detect anomalies among flu blogs connected by publisher type, links, and user-tags. http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/2/596/ Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CET International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2010-02-22 7 2 Article 596 615 1660-4601 Text and Structural Data Mining of Influenza Mentions in Web and Social Media 2010-02-22 doi: 10.3390/ijerph7020596 Courtney D. Corley Diane J. Cook Armin R. Mikler Karan P. Singh http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/7/1947/ Technological advances and societal changes in recent years have contributed to a shift in traditional care models and in the relationship between patients and their doctors/carers, with (in general) an increase in the patient-carer physical distance and corresponding changes in the modes of access to relevant care information by all groups. The objective of this paper is to showcase the research efforts of six projects (that the authors are currently, or have recently been, involved in), CAALYX, eCAALYX, COGKNOW, EasyLine+, I2HOME, and SHARE-it, all funded by the European Commission towards a future where citizens can take an active role into managing their own healthcare. Most importantly, sensitive groups of citizens, such as the elderly, chronically ill and those suffering from various physical and cognitive disabilities, will be able to maintain vital and feature-rich connections with their families, friends and healthcare providers, who can then respond to, and prevent, the development of adverse health conditions in those they care for in a timely manner, wherever the carers and the people cared for happen to be. http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/7/1947/ Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 CEST International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2009-07-06 6 7 Article 1947 1971 1660-4601 Connectivity for Healthcare and Well-Being Management: Examples from Six European Projects 2009-07-06 doi: 10.3390/ijerph6071947 Maged N. Kamel Boulos Ricardo Castellot Lou Athanasios Anastasiou Chris D. Nugent Jan Alexandersson Gottfried Zimmermann Ulises Cortes Roberto Casas http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/6/1870/ This paper illustrates how our development team has used some information technologies to let physicians obtain an instant abnormal laboratory result report for critical patient care services. We have implementeda healthcare message alerting system (HMAS) on a healthcare short message service (HSMS) engine and the distributed healthcare-oriented service environment (DiHOSE) in the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH). The HSMS engine has a general interface for all applications which could easily send any kind of alerting messages. Fundamentally, the DiHOSE uses HL7 standard formats to process the information exchange behaviors and can be flexibly extended for reasonable user requirements. The disease surveillance subsystem is an integral part of NTUH new hospital information system which is based on DiHOSE and the disease surveillance subsystem would send alerting messages through the HSMS engine. The latest cell phone message alerting subsystem, a case study, in NTUH proved that the DiHOSE could integrate the user required functions without much work. We concluded that both HSMS and DiHOSE can generalize and extend application demands efficiently. http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/6/1870/ Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 CEST International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2009-06-17 6 6 Article 1870 1881 1660-4601 A Service-Oriented Healthcare Message Alerting Architecture in an Asia Medical Center: A Case Study 2009-06-17 doi: 10.3390/ijerph6061870 Po-Hsun Cheng Feipei Lai Jin-Shin Lai http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/6/1818/ Kiosks can provide patients with access to health systems in public locations, but with increasing home Internet access their usefulness is questioned. A literature and informant review identified kiosks used for taking medical histories, health promotion, self assessment, consumer feedback, patient registration, patient access to records, and remote consultations. Sited correctly with good interfaces, kiosks can be used by all demographics but many ‘projects’ have failed to become routine practice. A role remains for: (a) integrated kiosks as part of patient ‘flow’, (b) opportunistic kiosks to catch people’s attention. Both require clear ‘ownership’ to succeed. http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/6/6/1818/ Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 CEST International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2009-06-11 6 6 Review 1818 1855 1660-4601 The Role of Health Kiosks in 2009: Literature and Informant Review 2009-06-11 doi: 10.3390/ijerph6061818 Ray Jones