The IEEE International Conference on Healthcare informatics (ICHI) is the premier international 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 wellness. The ICHI 2013 program includes several invited talks by leading researchers in Health Informatics, contributed paper presentations, as well as several workshops on emerging topics. ICHI 2013 is scheduled to be held during September 9-11 in Philadelphia, PA, USA.
The award supports approximately 20 students from U.S. universities to attend the ICHI 2013 doctoral consortium, an event that is specifically targeted to Ph.D. students. Special effort will be made to actively encourage women and members of other groups that are currently underrepresented in STEM disciplines to participate. The doctoral forum enables doctoral students to benefit from one-to-one mentoring from senior researchers, and interactions with other students in Health Informatics at a critical stage in their careers. The award contributes to the education and training of the next generation of researchers and educators in an increasingly important area. It also helps broaden the participation of members of underrepresented groups and women in Health Informatics research.
The First ICHI 2013 was organized in Philadelphia from September 8 to 11 in 2013. The conference was sponsored by the Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics of the IEEE Computer Society. It brought together researchers and scientists from academia and industry as well as practitioners to discuss their research and practices. The three-day conference program featured 3 keynote speeches, 55 regular papers and short papers for both oral and poster presentations, 14 extended abstracts, 1 tutorial, 1 panel, and a doctoral consortium. In addition, there were three affiliated workshops, including the International Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare (DMH 2013), the First Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing in Healthcare (WMCCH 2013), and the Workshop on Hospital Readmission Prediction and Clinical Risk Management (HRPCRM 2013). ICHI was organized in three major tracks: (1) Systems Track focuses on building health informatics systems (e.g., architecture, framework, design, engineering, and application), (2) Analytics Track focuses on data analytics; and (3) Human Factors Track focuses on understanding users or context, interface design, and user studies of health informatics applications. Papers were submitted to one of the three tracks. Each paper was reviewed by three or more reviewers in the program committee of over 160 members. The senior program committee members coordinated the discussion of each paper with other program committee members and made recommendations to the program committee co-chairs. The three program committee co-chairs, Drs. Carlo Combi, Zhiyong Lu, and Yin-Leng Theng, finalized the ICHI 2013 scientific program with 31 oral presentations and 24 poster presentations. There were 11 parallel oral presentation sessions covering topics: (1) Drug Management; (2) Human Factors: Applications; (3) Health Text Analytics; (4) Interactivity and Modality; (5) Health Organization and Epidemiology; (6) Health Risk Prediction; (7) Home-Assistance and Individual Care; (8) Human Factors: Effects and Outcomes; (9) Web-based Architectures and User Interactions. The contributing authors came from 21 countries and regions, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sri-Lanka, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Over 150 participants attended the conference and shared their valuable comments with the authors and the organizing committee. Two best paper awards were presented in the banquet on the second day of the conference. These two papers were "A Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Body and Ambient Sensor Networks that Mediates between Sensors and Applications" by Christian Seeger, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Jens Sauer and Alejandro Buchmann and "Empirical Evaluation of Traditional vs. Hybrid Interaction Metaphors in a Multitask Healthcare Simulation" by Lauren Cairco Dukes, Jeffrey Bertrand, Manan Gupta, Rowan Armstrong, Tracy Fasolino, Sabarish Babu and Larry F. Hodges. There were three outstanding keynote speeches on the first and second days of the conference. Prof. Harold Thimbleby from Swansea University, UK, offered his insights on improving safety in medical devices and systems. He talked about the impact of the errors made by the medical devices and how sophisticated design could improve safety in a hospital environment. Dr. Martin Kohn, IBM Chief Medical Scientist for Care Delivery Systems, talked about the Watson technologies in cognitive computing and healthcare. He discussed how the current Watson healthcare technologies could read a large volume of medical documents, extract knowledge, and assist health professionals to answer many complicated questions. Professor Larry Smarr, Founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), talked about how to reveal the dynamics of our superorganism body digitally. He discussed how he tracked over 100 blood and stool biomarkers and used advanced interactive visualization techniques to visually explore his organs. 28 doctoral students received financial traveling support to attend both of the doctoral consortium and the conference program. 24 domestic students were supported by the NSF grant and 4 international students were supported by the conference budget. The doctoral consortium chairs, Drs. Giuseppe Pozzi and David Buckeridge, selected 13 doctoral students to present their work in oral and poster formats in the three-hour program. Each doctoral student had the opportunity to receive individual mentorship from our mentors. A panel was also organized for the mentors and doctoral students to discuss the latest development of healthcare informatics research and the career preparation of our doctoral students.
