A perspective on integration and outreach: Guiding concepts in the evolution of health informatics.

Background: The National Library of Medicine's Integrated Academic/Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) initiative played a central role in the evolution of health informatics over the project's lifetime (1983-2009) and continues to do so.

Aim: Our objective is to demonstrate how IAIMS and two key IAIMS concepts, integration and outreach, have functioned at very different times during this evolutionary process.

Approach: Using a framework drawn from Lorenzi and Stead's 2021 history of IAIMS, we examine the role of integration and outreach in work at the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) in the early 1980s and at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA) in 2020.

Editorial: The health informatics series: Evolving with a new discipline.

A brief history of the book series launched by Springer-Verlag in 1988 as Computers in Healthcare stands as a case study of its role in the development of informatics in medicine. Renamed Health Informatics in 1998, the series grew to include 121 titles as of September 2022, covering topics from dental informatics to ethics, from human factors to mobile health. An analysis of three titles now in their fifth editions reveals the evolution of content in the core disciplines of nursing informatics and health information management.

STEM: An Open Source Tool for Disease Modeling.

The Spatiotemporal Epidemiologic Modeler (STEM) is an open source software project supported by the Eclipse Foundation and used by a global community of researchers and public health officials working to track and, when possible, control outbreaks of infectious disease in human and animal populations. STEM is not a model or a tool designed for a specific disease; it is a flexible, modular framework supporting exchange and integration of community models, reusable plug-in components, and denominator data, available to researchers worldwide at www.eclipse.

A generic open-source software framework supporting scenario simulations in bioterrorist crises.

Since the 2001 anthrax attack in the United States, awareness of threats originating from bioterrorism has grown. This led internationally to increased research efforts to improve knowledge of and approaches to protecting human and animal populations against the threat from such attacks. A collaborative effort in this context is the extension of the open-source Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) simulation and modeling software for agro- or bioterrorist crisis scenarios.

A global model of malaria climate sensitivity: comparing malaria response to historic climate data based on simulation and officially reported malaria incidence.

Background: The role of the Anopheles vector in malaria transmission and the effect of climate on Anopheles populations are well established. Models of the impact of climate change on the global malaria burden now have access to high-resolution climate data, but malaria surveillance data tends to be less precise, making model calibration problematic. Measurement of malaria response to fluctuations in climate variables offers a way to address these difficulties.

The cost of simplifying air travel when modeling disease spread.

Background: Air travel plays a key role in the spread of many pathogens. Modeling the long distance spread of infectious disease in these cases requires an air travel model. Highly detailed air transportation models can be over determined and computationally problematic.

Health and medical informatics competencies: call to participate in updating the IMIA recommendations.

Objectives: On behalf of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), its Working Group 1 (WG1) addresses health and medical informatics education.

Methods: As part of its mission, WG1 developed recommendations for competencies, describing a three-dimension framework and defining learning outcomes.

Results: Officially approved by IMIA in 1999, the recommendations have been translated into seven languages.

IT, patient safety, and quality care.

The growing understanding of medical errors as systemic in nature underscores the importance of analyzing and redesigning systems. Best practices in medication safety that promise rapid payback include computerized physician order entry, ongoing tracking and benchmarking, and the creation by leadership of nonpunitive environments where this new culture of safety can thrive.