Major goals of health care in the 21st century are to make health care more efficient and less costly. These goals can be accomplished by implementation of evidence-based care; greater coordination of patient care; implementation of preventive care and wellness measures; and the evaluation of outcomes of care to identify improved ways to provide care. A universal patient medical record can help achieve these goals of more efficient and less costly health care.

This User’s Guide is intended to support the design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and quality evaluation of registries created to increase understanding of patient outcomes. For the purposes of this guide, a patient registry is an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves one or more predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purposes. A registry database is a file (or files) derived from the registry. Although registries can serve many purposes, this guide focuses on registries created for one or more of the following purposes: to describe the natural history of disease, to determine clinical effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of health care products and services, to measure or monitor safety and harm, and/or to measure quality of care. Registries are classified according to how their populations are defined. For example, product registries include patients who have been exposed to biopharmaceutical products or medical devices. Health services registries consist of patients who have had a common procedure, clinical encounter, or hospitalization. Disease or condition registries are defined by patients having the same diagnosis, such as cystic fibrosis or heart failure. The User’s Guide was created by researchers affiliated with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, particularly those who participated in AHRQ’s DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness) program. Chapters were subject to multiple internal and external independent reviews.

With the immense amount of data that is now available online, security concerns have been an issue from the start, and have grown as new technologies are increasingly integrated in data collection, storage, and transmission. Online cyber threats, cyber terrorism, hacking, and other cybercrimes have begun to take advantage of this information that can be easily accessed if not properly handled. New privacy and security measures have been developed to address this cause for concern and have become an essential area of research within the past few years and into the foreseeable future. The ways in which data is secured and privatized should be discussed in terms of the technologies being used, the methods and models for security that have been developed, and the ways in which risks can be detected, analyzed, and mitigated. The Research Anthology on Privatizing and Securing Data reveals the latest tools and technologies for privatizing and securing data across different technologies and industries. It takes a deeper dive into both risk detection and mitigation, including an analysis of cybercrimes and cyber threats, along with a sharper focus on the technologies and methods being actively implemented and utilized to secure data online. Highlighted topics include information governance and privacy, cybersecurity, data protection, challenges in big data, security threats, and more. This book is essential for data analysts, cybersecurity professionals, data scientists, security analysts, IT specialists, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest trends and technologies for privatizing and securing data.

This book provides a multidisciplinary overview of the design and implementation of systems for remote patient monitoring and healthcare. Readers are guided step-by-step through the components of such a system and shown how they could be integrated in a coherent framework for deployment in practice. The authors explain planning from subsystem design to complete integration and deployment, given particular application constraints. Readers will benefit from descriptions of the clinical requirements underpinning the entire application scenario, physiological parameter sensing techniques, information processing approaches and overall, application dependent system integration. Each chapter ends with a discussion of practical design challenges and two case studies are included to provide practical examples and design methods for two remote healthcare systems with different needs.

Digital health and medical informatics have grown in importance in recent years, and have now become central to the provision of effective healthcare around the world. This book presents the proceedings of the 30th Medical Informatics Europe conference (MIE). This edition of the conference, hosted by the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) since the 1970s, was due to be held in Geneva, Switzerland in April 2020, but as a result of measures to prevent the spread of the Covid19 pandemic, the conference itself had to be cancelled. Nevertheless, because this collection of papers offers a wealth of knowledge and experience across the full spectrum of digital health and medicine, it was decided to publish the submissions accepted in the review process and confirmed by the Scientific Program Committee for publication, and these are published here as planned. The 232 papers are themed under 6 section headings: biomedical data, tools and methods; supporting care delivery; health and prevention; precision medicine and public health; human factors and citizen centered digital health; and ethics, legal and societal aspects. A 7th section deals with the Swiss personalized health network, and section 8 includes the 125 posters accepted for the conference. Offering an overview of current trends and developments in digital health and medical informatics, the book provides a valuable information resource for researchers and health practitioners alike.