Aims and Scope
Modern healthcare entails complex processes for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. The patients' consumption of products and services provided by hospitals and other institutions forms the healthcare industry, which is one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of a country's economy. The technical possibilities to improve the quality of life – and indeed extend life-span – are continually propelling this industry. In modern healthcare proper collection, management and utilization of health information play a critical role in detecting health problems, identifying innovative solutions and allocating resources to treat patients. Information technologies are widely employed to improve the quality of healthcare services.

There are a number of significant technologies and emerging models that are making a big splash on the healthcare information technologies and applications. The following trends can be observed:
•Health Sensing: There’s been a sharp incline in the quantity and variety of consumer devices and medical sensors that capture some aspect of physiological, cognitive and physical human health. The implementation of these technologies empowers the end-users (e.g., chronic patients), by providing means to monitor and record the status continually and, if need arises, seek remote assistance.
•Scalability & Flexibility: With healthcare providers looking at automating processes to lower the operating costs, emerging technologies, such as cloud computing, can provide an ideal platform to achieve highly efficient use of computing resources, simplify management, and improve services in a safe and secure manner. Furthermore, a large amount of healthcare data has been accumulated and its size is increasing in an unprecedented rate. Discovering the deep knowledge, values and patterns from vast healthcare data is the key to deliver the best evidence-based, patient-centric, and accountable care. There is no doubt that the adoption of these innovative technologies in medical fields can create significant opportunities. Nevertheless, many challenges still need to be addressed in order to achieve truly enhanced healthcare services.
•Local Empowerment: Emerging technologies and growing integration is evolving into intelligent and partially autonomous local implementations that support end-user self-reliance and self-determination, while at the same time providing supporting teleservices like telemonitoring and telecare. Empowering customers can be done by surrounding them with a supporting social and technical collaborative network.

The aim of this special issue is to investigate how these emerging information technologies and models are employed in creating new means for healthcare service providers and their patients to readily access and use health information and consequently improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of the health care.

Topics
This special issue calls for original papers describing the theories, methodologies, and solutions about the innovative application of emerging information technologies that deals with the collection, storage, retrieval, sharing, and use of health data and knowledge for communication and decision making. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
• Health sensing technologies and systems;
• Health data storage, processing and manipulation;
• Data mining/deep knowledge discovery from health data;
• Big data analytics for health support;
• Mobile health services/systems;
• Personalized health services/systems;
• Privacy and security with respect to health data;
• Intelligent healthcare/decision support systems;
• Health resource management;
• Health related image and video processing;
• Cloud computing for healthcare;
• Pervasive and ubiquitous computing for healthcare delivery;
• Semantic/knowledge driven health information management,

We are looking for innovative papers on healthcare supporting applications that are end-user centric, retaining their dignity and guarding their privacy, and whereby the proposed methodologies are based on innovative applied research, validated by pilot studies or implementations and targeting specific issues. In particular, submitted papers should:
• Show new trends in and options for the use of ICT in healthcare.
• Link or integrate different technology fields in the broad area of healthcare.
• Link or integrate different application areas of ICT in healthcare.

Submission procedure:
Selection of the papers for the Special Issue will be done in two stages:
1. Submission of an extended abstract (around 2 pages). The abstract should state the title and keywords. It should clearly address Motivation, Problem, Approach/Solution, Case Study and Contribution of the proposed paper.
2. Submission of a full paper. Only authors of extended abstracts which are within the scope of the Special Issue and which indicate a clear contribution to the field will be invited to submit a full paper. The full papers will be subjected to a blind review, possibly in two rounds depending on the reviewers’ comments. Submission of full papers will be done through the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) about which authors will be informed after notification of acceptance of the extended abstract.

Please submit your extended abstract by email to the Guest Editors as a self-contained PDF file following the instructions for authors found on the Computers in Industry website, www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505646/authorinstructions.

Important Deadlines:
• Extended abstract (2 pages):  September 1, 2013
• Notification of acceptance for submission of a full paper:  November 1, 2013
• Submission of full paper:  February 1, 2014
• Completion of first round reviews:  April 15, 2014
• Completion of second round reviews:  June 15, 2014
• Camera ready version:  July 31, 2014
• Publication of the Special Issue:  September 2014

Special Issue Guest Editors
• Prof. Ji-Jiang Yang, Tsinghua University, China. (Email: yangjijiang@tsinghua.edu.cn)
• Dr. Jian-Qiang Li, NEC Labs, China. (Email: jianqiangli.email@gmail.com)
• Dr. Jacob Mulder, CGI, the Netherlands. (Email: jacob.mulder@cgi.com)