MEDINFO 2010

IMIA's Medinfo 2010 conference in Cape Town, the first to be held in Africa, focuses on the needs of and solutions from developing countries in Africa and beyond. This book, which presents the proceedings of Medinfo 2010, contains tutorials, workshops, keynotes, presentations, panels, demonstrations and posters, selected after review, from the 905 submissions received. These contributions are organised under four major themes; hospital information systems, consumer-health informatics, knowledge management and national and international health IT. The content covers all aspects of modern health informatics, ranging from traditional topics such as hospital information systems, patient registries, nursing informatics, data integration, standards, interoperability issues and decision support, to new topics such as translational bioinformatics, text mining, intelligent data analysis, emerging technologies, quality, social networking, workflow and organizational issues.
It is well recognised that information and communication technologies have enormous potential for improving the health and lives of individuals, but innovative and effective change using such technologies is dependent upon people working together in partnerships, with particular regard to contextual and environmental factors. The theme selected for the Medinfo 2010 conference is a topic that most countries are currently addressing: 'partnerships for effective ehealth solutions - innovative collaborations promote solutions to health challenges, and this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use of biomedical and health informatics.