The digital health space refers to the integration of technology and health care services to improve the overall quality of health care delivery. It encompasses a wide range of innovative and emerging technologies such as wearables, telehealth, artificial intelligence, mobile health, and electronic health records (EHRs). The digital health space offers numerous benefits such as improved patient outcomes, increased access to health care, reduced costs, and improved communication and collaboration between patients and health care providers. For example, patients can now monitor their vital signs such as blood pressure and glucose levels from home using wearable devices and share the data with their doctors in real-time. Telehealth technology allows patients to consult with their health care providers remotely without having to travel to the hospital, making health care more accessible, particularly in remote or rural areas. Artificial intelligence can be used to analyze vast amounts of patient data to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and provide personalized treatment recommendations. Overall, the digital health space is rapidly evolving, and the integration of technology in health

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Blockchain for Health Care and Biomedical Science

JMIR - View Announcement: Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet


The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) is inviting submissions for a special issue of the journal that will be dedicated to blockchain for health care and biomedical science.
Health care today is known to suffer from siloed and fragmented data delayed clinical communications and disparate workflow tools due to the lack of interoperability caused by vendor-locked health care systems, lack of trust relationships among data holders, and security/privacy concerns regarding data sharing.

Blockchain technology and decentralized applications (DApps) have the potential to alleviate the traditionally high dependency on centralized, trusted parties for certification of information integrity and data ownership. These distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) mediate transactions and exchanges of digital assets in a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, which allows agreements (ie, smart contracts) to be directly made between interacting parties while guaranteeing their execution. Key properties of blockchain technology, including immutability, decentralization, distribution, replicated storage, and transparency, provide a unique position for this technology to serve as a potential infrastructure to address pressing issues in health care, such as incomplete records at the point of care and difficult access to patients’ own health information.  

Aside from health care data sharing that is of paramount importance for improving care quality, there is also a wide range of opportunities for health care to leverage a decentralized technology, such as tracking the provenance of medical devices, expediting the process of medical billing and medical claims adjudication, connecting alike patient populations to clinical trials, and creating more patient-centered services. Besides the identifications of various opportunities in the use of blockchain technology in health care, research efforts on rigorously analyzing the performance of blockchain-based health care systems, proposed or existing, that focuses on security, privacy, scalability, availability, and robustness are highly demanded.
In addition, blockchain technology also opens up new opportunities for biomedical science and to disrupt the current publishing and peer-review system. 
Following the examples of previously published papers on blockchain in health care in JMIR journals, authors are invited to submit papers describing original, unpublished research results, position papers, proposals, tutorials (“How-to…”, “What is…?”), case studies and tools. Papers are solicited that deal with health care or biomedical research topics related to DLT like blockchain.
Topic areas include, but are not limited to:
    • Provenance and trust management of medical devices or medications
    • Medical workflow enhancements with decentralized approaches
    • Security analysis of blockchain-based solutions
    • Decentralized management and monitoring of healthcare IoT/Edge devices
    • Anonymity and privacy in blockchain-based healthcare systems
    • Innovative architectures & platforms for driving health care interoperability
    • Scalability, security, privacy, and system robustness
    • Large datasets (eg, medical image data), AI, and Blockchain technology
    • Fraud detection and avoidance in medical billing
    • Biomedical Science DApps
    • Digital tokens, incentives, economic ecosystems
    • Medical or patient identity provision and maintenance
Blockchain proposals (such as http://www.researchprotocols.org/2018/9/e10163/) are welcome as long as they contain sufficient details of the current status (early-stage proposals may be transferred to JMIR Res Protoc but will still show up in the e-collection).

Submission of Papers

THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED DUE TO THE COVID19 SHELTER IN PLACE
Extended submission deadline: March 31st, 2020 (earlier submissions may be published faster and receive priority, so please submit your manuscript as soon as it is ready).
To submit, please go to http://www.jmir.org/author and in step 1 of submission, select “Theme Issue 2019: Blockchain” section from the section drop-down list. See also How do I submit to a theme issue?
For this special issue, the regular Article Processing Fees are discounted by 20%.

Timeline

Submission of Full Paper Due: March 31st, 2020

Editors

JMIR Editor-in-chief
Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH FACMI
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