IT for health

‘IT for health’ covers a large number of research areas: medical informatics, system development, modelling and information access for systems within the healthcare sector. Healthcare and medical care is a complex area in which many professions interact.  The aim is to improve medical care by meeting the need for IT systems at various levels, from county councils and hospitals to small mobile units for the elderly and nursing homes. IT for health also covers question & answering systems for health sites, analysis of search logs on general health websites for the detection of illnesses and infectious disease spreading, and automatic e-mail answering systems within health and insurance medicine. IT for health can also cover everything from text mining and information access in large databases consisting of millions of patient records with unstructured text information which contain symptoms, diagnoses, medication and discharge letters, to advanced medical decision support for risk assessment, for example.