1 Special Focus

The application of innovative, mobile, and ubiquitous technology is important not only for coordination, organization, and administration of medical processes, but may also be lifesaving in context of medical care. Imaginable for the future is the physician’s access to a patient’s health record directly at the scene of an accident, or an “App” warning an asthmatic, if his physical strain is too high. So-called “heart phones” are already in use today. Heart patients can record at any time an ECG with their mobile phone and send it to their cardiologist. With all these applications more safety for physicians and patients through a faster work flow can be achieved.

Besides medical applications, an improvement of coordination, organization, and administration of the processes are possible. Applications like patient tracking or the use of a mobile, rule-based anamnesis system help to get more transparency in patient treatment process, help to prevent unnecessary examinations, and help to provide data of high quality more quickly. From patients’ view needless physical and mental stress caused by long waiting times or multiple examinations can be avoided. Furthermore it’s possible to reduce loss of quality caused by avoidable additional work of physicians and nursing staff.

Meanwhile, these developments are tightly coupled with important trends like the Internet of things, teletrust, e-identity, reliable and trustworthy public telematics infrastructures and the creation of electronically interlocked processes within the healthcare sector, and between healthcare and public administration.

Against this background the use of mobile and ubiquitous applications is a basic instrument to increase process transparency and fasten the flow of information in order to improve patient care and reduce health care costs. But the users’ willingness to accept and actively use these new and innovative solutions is required.

For stimulating and further deepen the discussion between science and practice, the journal Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) addresses a special issue about “mobile and ubiquitous solutions for health care of the future”. Collecting present developments, new methods and technologies including their application in the field of mobile and ubiquitous applications and evaluating their suitability for the future is the aim.

Contributions from research and business practice on the following (and related) topics are welcome:

  • Innovations and change management

  • Acceptance of technology

  • Health telematics

  • Electronic health card, and health professional card

  • Data security and safety aspects

  • Developments und Best Practices – both national and international

  • Transfer of success strategies from industry to health care

  • Further issues in the field of mobile and ubiquitous applications

2 Submission

Please submit papers for the sections BISE – Research Paper and BISE – State of the Art by 2012-03-01 at the latest via the journal’s online submission system (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/). Please observe the instructions regarding the format and size of contributions to Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE)/WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. Papers should not exceed 50,000 characters including spaces, minus 5,000 characters per page for illustrations. Detailed authors’ guidelines can be downloaded from http://www.bise-journal.org.

All papers will be reviewed anonymously (double-blind process) by several referees with regard to relevance, originality, and research quality. In addition to the editors of the journal, including those of this special focus, distinguished national and international professionals with scientific and practical backgrounds will be involved in the review process.

Complementary articles covering topics of this special focus are also more than welcome.

Accepted papers will appear identically in English and German. The English-language version will appear in Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE), the German-language version will appear in WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. Accepted papers will be translated in close cooperation with the authors and a professional team of translators.

3 Schedule

Submission deadline: 2012-03-01

Author notification: 2012-04-26

Completion of first revision: 2012-06-28

Author notification: 2012-08-16

Completion of a second revision (if needed, monolingual): 2012-09-20

Completion of a second revision (if needed, bilingual): 2012-10-18

Planned publication date of Issue 01/2013: February 2013