Healthcare Transformation and Innovation in Digital, Aging, and Smart Society

Dear Colleagues,

We are now in a digital and smart society. In recent years, lots of emerging information technologies have begun to attract a lot of attention, including mobile Internet, big data, communication technology (5G), cloud computing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and so on. The rapid development of these technologies has promoted the intelligence of society. The digital and smart society has improved people’s living standards but also changed people’s habits and ways of thinking. With the changes in people’s living habits, ways of thinking, forms of communication, and technical support, healthcare is constantly transforming and benefitting from innovations. Differently from traditional medicine, healthcare is combining with emerging technologies to produce effective products, intelligent assisted diagnosis, Internet hospitals, wearable medical devices, intelligent surgical devices, medical big data analysis, online health communities, and other products which have improved people’s medical conditions and health levels.

We are also moving toward global aging. In order to adapt to aged societies, and to support a greater desire of people to live independently as well as to enable younger generations to maintain their health and active participation in the society when they grow old, we need a significant change in the behaviors and thought processes of healthcare providers, the public, and elderly people’s friends and families. This will relate to all aspects of a person’s life, including planning, decision making, and day-to-day living. To make super-aged societies sustainable, innovations with digital technologies are necessary to enhance people’s happiness and reduce social costs at the same time.

This Special Issue focuses on how to utilize these transformations and innovations to further promote health and better deal with the global aging challenge, and it invites research on, among others, technology development or applications in digital and smart health, empirical analysis of health behavior, and managerial decision problems in digital health. Papers on the considerable research challenges and comprehensive achievements are especially welcome.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to: 

• Emerging digital technologies, Internet, and health innovation
• Health IT acceptance or involvement
• Health information systems
• Chronic disease prevention and management
• Behavioral issues in health science innovation
• Safety, security, and privacy of health information technologies
• Artificial intelligence in healthcare
• Online health communities
• Big data and health informatics
• E-Health and smart health
• Internet hospitals
• Clinical, public health, and genomic data integration
• Health knowledge management, dissemination, communication, and health promotion
• Elderly health and aging care
• Community and rural healthcare innovation
• Mobile health and health social networks
• Mobile Apps, wearable devices, Internet-based health IT products
• Healthcare policy analysis
• Combination and integration of medicine, healthcare, and aging care
• Operation management and decision science in healthcare
• Safety and health management in the workspace
• The Internet of healthcare

Dr. Dongxiao Gu
Prof. Dr. Jiantong Zhang
Prof. Dr. Jia Li
Dr. Dong-Heon (Austin) Kwak
Dr. Oleg V. Zolotarev
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.