Information Technology in Healthcare

Now in its 24th year, the Information Technology in Healthcare track at HICSS continues to evolve and expand. However, the track retains its original mission: To serve as a forum at which healthcare, computer science, and information systems professionals can come together to discuss issues related to the application of information technology in healthcare.

The cross-disciplinary nature of the track is clearly evident in the set of minitracks and in the papers within the minitracks. This year’s 15 minitracks represent 13 returning from last year, a few with minor name changes and two new minitracks, noted with an “*” below.

• Big-Data on Healthcare Application
• Decision Support of Healthcare Processes and Services
• Digital-Enabled Human Information Interaction*
• Enabling New Delivery Models for Ubiquitous and Comprehensive Healthcare
• Health Behavior Change Support Systems
• ICT-enabled Self-management of Chronic Diseases and Conditions
• IT Adoption, Diffusion and Evaluation in Healthcare
• IT Architecture and Implementations in Healthcare Environments
• Patient-Facing Information Technology Implementation in Healthcare
• Personal Health and Wellness Management with Technologies
• Process Mining in Healthcare*
• Security and Privacy Challenges for Healthcare
• Senior's Use of Digital Resources
• Social Media and Healthcare Technology
• Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality in Healthcare

The minitrack coordinators provide brief summaries of their minitracks and overviews of the papers in their sessions. As evidenced by the names of the minitracks, the track covers a very diverse set of IT and health management related issues. We see foci on organizational issues, such as adoption and diffusion of technology, IT architectures, security, and healthcare processes; on personal health and social media, including health behavioral change and self-managed care; and on specific technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality and data analytics. The largest minitracks continue to be those on IT adoption and diffusion, personal health, and social media.

The 64 papers across the minitracks address a wide range of clinical, managerial, technical issues, social, and policy issues, and report on studies from around the world. Not surprisingly and researchers in IT and healthcare are responding to the current world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20% of the papers address some aspect of managing the pandemic. Papers include “COVID-19 Information on YouTube in the Early Pandemic” and “Smartwatch Use in Mitigating COVID-19.” We also see a growing focus on the application machine learning and artificial intelligence. Example papers include “Machine Learning-Based Decision Support for Fraud Detection on Medical Claim Data” and “An End-to-End Machine Learning Solution for Anxiety and Depressive Disorder Symptom Occurrence During COVID-19.” Personal health and social media papers include “Feasibility and Acceptability of a Wrist-worn Transdermal Alcohol Biosensor to Collect Data in the Field” and “Coping and Regulatory Responses on Social Media during Health Crisis.” An example paper covering organizational issues is “Classifying Cyber-Risky Clinical Notes by Employing Natural Language Processing.”

Despite the diversity of topics and countries represented in this track, all of the papers have a common focus: How can information technologies be use to improve the quality of care, the efficiency of the delivery of healthcare, and improve the overall health and wellness of individuals and populations?

We wish to thank all of the people who have worked so diligently to develop this track; we appreciate the time and effort the minitrack coordinators had to spend over the past year of the pandemic. The high quality collection of papers in the track is the fruit of their efforts. We look forward to the further development of this track. We welcome, and strongly solicit, your participation in this track at future HICSS conferences. Please contact us with your ideas for new minitracks or papers.

We hope you find the proceedings useful and enjoyable.

William G. Chismar
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
chismar@hawaii.edu

Thomas A. Horan
University of Redlands
Thomas.Horan@redlands.edu