Skip to main content Skip to navigation

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making Supplement

BMC Medical Informatic and Decision Making

Multidimensional, multidiscipline and shared decision making in healthcare and eHealth

(Link to the special issue)

The design, the development, the evaluation, the adoption and the maintenance of healthcare technologies require multidimensional and multidiscipline decisions based on the best available evidence.

Clinical evidence, economic data, ergonomics and technical issues are some of complex factors dynamically interacting to drive decision in healthcare. The interaction of these multidiscipline and multidimensional factors is even more dynamic and complex, in particularly challenging scenarios.
For instance, this is the case of design, assessment and adoption of complex healthcare technologies (e.g. laparoscopic/robotic surgical interventions), requiring complex and dynamic interactions between several healthcare operators and the use of complex medical devices, requiring long-term learning curves.

Another scenario in which healthcare decision making is particularly challenging is the design and/or the assessment of eHealth and ICT interventions for healthcare. Among other reasons, this is because the progressive overcoming of the hospital-centric health service models is creating the need for new and unexplored complex and dynamic interactions between users with different backgrounds (i.e. healthcare professionals, informal carers, patient/citizen) and new generations of medical devices, which in some cases are based on technologies not originally conceived for healthcare applications (e.g. mobile phones or ambient sensors).

The goal of this journal supplement is to collect cutting-edge methods, case studies and application of multidimensional, multidiscipline and shared decision making in particularly challenging healthcare scenarios. We are therefore welcoming submission of papers describing healthcare applications of methods, models and/or tools for:

  • Multi Criteria Decision Making in healthcare
  • Clinical decision-making
  • Shared decision making
  • Pre-market assessment of healthcare technologies to inform their design, development, evaluation, adoption and/or maintenance
  • User need elicitation
  • Health technology assessment of medical devices and of e-Health

Important Dates

  • Submissions due: 12th of February 2015 new deadline: 26th of Febrary 2015
  • First decisions: 12th of March 2015
  • Revised submissions due: 12th of April 2015
  • Final decisions: 12th of May 2015

Guest Editors

  • Leandro Pecchia, University of Warwick, UK email: l dot pecchia at warwick dot ac dot uk
  • Chris Nugent, University of Ulster, UK
  • Paolo Melillo, Second University of Naples, Italy
  • Umberto Bracale, University Federico II of Naples, Italy
  • Fabio De Felice, University of Cassino, Italy

Submission process

Articles have to be submitted via the following email address Special.BMC.MIDM@warwick.ac.uk

Instructions for authors

Please use this format template for the paper submission. Each paper will be assigned to two independent peer reviewers. Papers given major revision after the first round of revision will be rejected.

Please note that BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making is an open access journal that charges a fee to paper, if accepted for publication. Here further details. The fee policy for supplements is different and institutional discounts cannot be applied for supplements. Please contact the editorial board for further details. Authors will be instructured about payment process when the final decision about the paper acceptance will be made.

According to the Journal Policy on duplicate publication, articles must be original and must not have been already published elsewhere (although they may have been deposited in a pre-print server). Previous publication of a short abstract (around 400 words) would not prevent BioMed Central from publishing the related full-length article, but we cannot accept extended abstracts or articles from the conference that have been or are being published elsewhere. Authors should ensure that copyright has not been claimed on any previously published abstract and should cite the original publication in their article.