EHealth2015 – Health Informatics Meets EHealth

Book excerpt: Traditionally, medicine has involved therapies chosen according to clinical guidelines, often arrived at through clinical trials which categorized patients into patient groups. Such clinical guidelines would dictate that all patients within a specific group should be treated in exactly the same way. More recently, the paradigm has shifted towards personalized medicine, and in future, individual treatment plans will depend more on the specific characteristics of individual patients, including genomic data. This book presents the proceedings of the 9th scientific eHealth conference, the eHealth Summit Austria, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2015. Among the main topics addressed at the conference were: active and ambient assisted living (AAL); eHealth education; electronic patient and health records; ethical legal and economic aspects of eHealth; ICT for integrated treatment, research and personalized medicine; patient portals and personal health records; semantic interoperability of information systems; and visualization of clinical or epidemiological data. One of the first fields of application for personalized medicine has been oncology, with current diagnostic tools including molecular risk factors, biomarkers and individual genomes. The next step in personalized medicine will be to extend these to a more general, personalized health approach. Such individual risk assessment and preventive strategies promise to have a huge impact on our healthcare systems, and this book will be of interest to all those involved in healthcare research, provision and practice.