17th International Conference on Informatics, Management and Technology in Health Care, Athens, Greece, 5-7 July, 2019

During the period from 5th to 7th July of the 2019 17th International Conference on Informatics, Management in Technology and Healthcare (ICIMTH 2019) was held in Athens, Greece.

The title of the 17^th ICIMTH Conference was: “Health Informatics Vision: From Data via Information to Knowledge” (1). At the Conference were presented: 4 keynotes, 89 papers, 18 poster presentations, 4 Invited workshop and 2 Special Panel Sessions by presenters from over 30 countries in the world. Special Session has organized as EFMI Honorary Session during which Anne Moen, former President of EFMI and and Ragnar Nordberg, former Treasurer of EFMI, received certificates as new elected Honorary Fellows of EFMI at EFMI Council meeting held in Zagreb, Croatia in 2018.

The conference represents one of the largest European gathering in the field of Medical informatics: Medical/Health/Biomedical Informatics, Biomedical Engineering, Information Science, Health Informatics, Clinical Informatics, Public Health Informatics, Healthcare IT, Decision Support and Intelligent Systems, Diagnostic Technologies for Medical Decision Support, Formalization of Knowledge, Ontologies, Clinical Guidelines and Standards of Healthcare, Telemedicine, Interoperability in Healthcare Systems, Imaging, Health Information Management, Knowledge Management, Health Technology Assessment, E-learning and Education, Robotics and Virtual Reality, Socio-Economic Issues, Standards, Social and Legal Issues.

ICIMTH 2019 Conference has opened by President of EFMI, professor Lacramioara Stoicu-Tivadar with interesting lecture: “Medical Education in a Digital Society: IT is a Support or a Chalange?”

Over three days, 4 invited lectures were presented: Reinhold Haux (“Some Thoughts on Extended Collaboration of Entities with Natural and with Artificial Intelligence in Health Care and Beyond”); Theodoros N. Arvanitis (“Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Radiomics Informatics Approaches Toward Personalized Medicine”); Catherine Chronaki (“International Patient Summary and Open Standard APs for Value-Based Care”); Patrick Weber (“Standards and Nursing”).

Panayota Sourtzi chaired panel “Applications of Information Technology in Health” (panelists were: Marianna Diomidous, Stelios Zimeras and Costas Chardalias), and Panel chaired by George Mihalas with title: “Medical Informatics: the Crossroads Between Information Technologies and Medical Specialties” (panelists were: George Mihalas, Arie Hasman, Lacramioara Stoicu-Tivadar and John Mantas).

During ICIMTH 2019 Conference were organized two interesting workshops: John Mantas moderated workshop “CrowdHEALTH EU Project” and Reinhold Haux moderated workshop: “On Writing for Publication and on Good Research in Biomedical and Health Informatics”.

All keynote lectures and paper and poster presentations were followed by interesting discussions. Participants were able to participate with presentations of full papers and posters and all gathered had the opportunity to learn about the latest developments of health informatics achievemnts in all segments of biomedicine and to see many presentations about the use of information technologies (IT) in different fields of healthcare systems in the world.

Figure 1. Participants of the ICIMTH Conference in Athens, Greece, July, 2019.

Figure 2. Poster presentation of Professor Izet Masic at ICIMTH 2019 Conference about Google Scolar Index disadvantages.

Figure 3. Promotion of the book “Biografico Lexico” in Greak language during ICITHM 2019 Conference in Athens, Greece, July 2019.

During Closing Ceremony John Mantas, Chair of the Organizing Committee promoted a new book “Biografico Leksiko”, written by Professor Izet Masic, translated from English language to Greek language by Professor Marianna Diomidous (original title of the book is “Biographical Lexicon of Public Health”) - Masic I. Biografico Lexico. Broken Hill Publisher LTD, Nicosia, Cyprus. 2019: 623. pp. ISBN: 978-9925-563-26-5).

As usual, like in previous years, great job of reviewed and selected papers which were presented at ICIMTH 2019 have done by Professor Arie Hasman (2-4). The Organizing Committee, led by Professor John Mantas and his tream, chaired by Paris Galos, have done also a really great job.

We hope that “ICIMTH 2020” Conference which is now traditional scientific event in the field of Biomedical Informatics in Europe and larger, next year will attract larger number of participants, because event like this certainly deserves it.

All papers are published in the Proceedings of ICIMTH 2019, by IOS Press publisher, Amsterdam, and papers are indexed in MEDLINE. Presented papers show that Information technologies certainly have growing use in all segments of medicine and its use certainly represents the future of all disciplines and subdisciplines of medicine and healthcare protection.

Author of this report at ICIMTH 2019 Conference presented very two interesting presentations: first one, about most frequent mistakes of statistical analysis of PhD students thesis, and second one about disadvantages of Google Scholar Index, as one of most frequent index used currently in the praxis, but with a lot of mistakes (5, 6).

It was discussed during ICITHM 2019 Conference with many participants as very important topic, who agreed with my opinion. But, very few academics and scientists openly written about it. We shall see feed-back of the critics for my comments, conclusions and recommendations what to do in the future and who, how, and what need to do for improving Google Scholar Index.

Webometrics use this index as very important platform for assessment of academic institutions and universities and professional academic staffs, but very few people make evaluation of that. Somebody need to do it, definitely.