Health and clinical management: from patient care to national public health increasing the integration of all health care participants and systems interoperability for better care management.
OBJECTIVE
To present some of last year's best papers in the field of health and clinical management.


METHODS
Synopsis of the best articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2009.


RESULTS
The selected articles illustrate how IT is enlarging its role in heath care management. By getting closer to patients allowing them feeding systems with there health data, IT can improve patient health management directly at patients' home. With data being documented in increasingly more structured and standardized way, health information systems can better integrated and reuse that data and offer more decision support to physicians and other health professionals. Furthermore, as more data is available in electronic format in real-time, entire populations' health status can be monitored by public health authorities allowing for better public health management.


CONCLUSIONS
Although the selected articles are only a few bricks in global health management, they are promising examples of how IT improves the integration and collaboration between all participants in health care and offers support at all levels. Tying all these separate bricks together will still require work, as well as developing all the remain bricks, but systems interoperability allowing for data sharing and health participants collaboration are continuously getting more real.
Kubias
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Service of Medical Informatics, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. daniel.kubias@sim.hcuge.ch
D001363:Awards and Prizes; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics; D011634:Public Health