Special track
HPORT-BD: Health Portals and Big Data Visualization
Chair and Coordinator
Assistant Professor Athina Lazakidou, Digital Health Applications & Health Economics Analytics Laboratory,
Dept. of Economics, University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece
lazakid@uop.gr
along with
HEALTHINFO 2017, October 8 - 12, 2017 - Athens, Greece
The Second International Conference on Informatics and Assistive Technologies for Health-Care, Medical
Support and Wellbeing
http://www.iaria.org/conferences2017/HEALTHINFO17.html

Data has always been key to measure the quality of care, analyze health trends, predict epidemics and
improve treatments. But today, we can do this faster and better than ever before. Health Portals and
Visualization Tools can help healthcare organizations leverage analytics to improve their processes and the
outcomes of care. Analyzing Big Data holds tremendous promises for improving healthcare.
There is a huge amount of existing data distributed in several repositories and new data generated daily by
billions of connected devices or self generated by people. It is necessary to find more appropriate and effective
ways to leverage these data in line with privacy and ethical principles, to access them, to understand the
purposes for their adoption and their quality in order to improve and optimize care processes, diseases
diagnosis, personalized care and in general the healthcare system.
Patients and healthcare professionals are profiting from big data. There is a need to develop approaches that
allow for humans and machines to cooperate more closely on exploiting big data for a better health. This
includes guarantees on the trustworthiness of information, a focus on generating actionable advice, and
improving the interactivity and understandability of big data processing and analytics. The requirements of
different target groups - researchers, doctors and care-givers, or patients and general population – may require
different focus.
When healthcare organizations envision the future of big data, they often think of using it for analyzing textbased
notes. Current analytics technologies for the most part make use of discrete data and struggle to capitalize
on all of the valuable clinical information captured in physicians’ and nurses’ notes. Big data indexing
techniques, and some of the new work finding information in textual fields, could indeed add real value to
healthcare analytics in the future. With the overlay of advanced big data analytics, healthcare providers and
executives can make great leaps ahead in terms of improving patient outcomes, while lowering the costs of
doing so.
Submissions are encouraged from all areas of practice relevant to HEALTHINFO 2017.
Topics include, but not limited to:
 Digital Health Applications
 Big Data Technologies in Healthcare
 Health Portals
 Health Data Visualization and Reporting
 Health Economics Analytics
 Geographic Information Systems in Healthcare

Important Datelines
- Inform the Chair: As soon as you decided to contribute
- Submission: August 31
- Notification: September 7
- Registration: September 14
- Camera ready: September 14
Note: These deadlines are somewhat flexible, providing arrangements are made ahead of time with the chair.

Contribution Types
- Regular papers [in the proceedings, digital library]
- Short papers (work in progress) [in the proceedings, digital library]
- Posters: two pages [in the proceedings, digital library]
- Posters: slide only [slide-deck posted on www.iaria.org]
- Presentations: slide only [slide-deck posted on www.iaria.org]
- Demos: two pages [posted on www.iaria.org]

Paper Format
- See: http://www.iaria.org/format.html
- Before submission, please check and comply with the editorial rules: http://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html

Publications
- Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals: http://www.iariajournals.org
- Print proceedings will be available via Curran Associates, Inc.: http://www.proceedings.com/9769.html
- Articles will be archived in the free access ThinkMind Digital Library: http://www.thinkmind.org

Paper Submission
https://www.iariasubmit.org/conferences/submit/newcontribution.php?event=HEALTHINFO+2017+Special
Please select Track Preference as HPORT-BD

Registration
- Each accepted paper needs at least one full registration, before the camera-ready manuscript can be included in
the proceedings.
- Registration fees are available at http://www.iaria.org/registration.html

Contacts
Athina Lazakidou, University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece lazakid@uop.gr
HEALTHINFO logistics: steve@iaria.org