Current Trends in Biomedical and Health Informatics

Introduction

Biomedical and health informatics (BMHI) as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice is growing, and research topics and trends are evolving rapidly. The future of the field has been subject to scientific discussions and bibliometric analyses have been published regularly in different BMHI journals. A recent cluster analysis of scientific publications in BMHI during 2006 to 2017 revealed five different clusters whereof two, namely “Mobile Health” and “Clinical Informatics,” describe upcoming topics.[1] The remaining three clusters, namely “Organizational Aspects of Health Information Systems,” “Biomedical Data Analysis,” and “Electronic Health Records and Knowledge Representation” correspond to clusters that were found in a previous analysis of research publications by other authors for the time period 1993 to 2007.[2]

The “Mobile Health” topic elicited in[1] relates very much to the field of consumer health informatics. Accordingly, another study found that most publications in the area of consumer health informatics during 2014 to 2016 dealt with “Mobile Health” and “Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD).”[3] From another perspective, the results of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2015 year-in-review in clinical and consumer informatics were organized under three themes: the electronic health record (EHR), the learning health system, and consumer engagement.[4]

• References

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• 11 Wilkinson MD, Dumontier M, Aalbersberg IJ. , et al. The FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 2016; 3: 160018