The Proceedings of MEDINFO 2019 (the 17th World Congress of Medical and Health Informatics located in Lyon, France) illustrate how informatics scholars from all over the world are pursuing projects related to the theme of Health and Wellbeing e-Networks for All. Throughout this publication, readers will find innovative approaches to the collection, organization, analysis, and sharing of data and knowledge related to health and wellbeing. The articles in these proceedings not only document the state-of-the-art in our field worldwide, but also remind readers of how they can build on past discoveries and get motivated to pursue new paths in the future.

Every two years the medical and health informatics community assembles to discuss the latest findings in informatics, to meet old friends, and to make new ones. New generations come together to showcase their research, hear from their peers as well as from those who contribute to their training, and start to pave their way to be our future leaders. Those of us who have been attending these meetings for a long time continue to be amazed by the energy of newcomers, the wisdom and determination of informatics pioneers, the drive of foundational and practice-oriented informaticians, and the incredible amount of work that it takes to organize this conference.

These Proceedings are a small but critical part of what MEDINFO is all about. They feature articles and abstracts describing research, training, and service functions that informaticians all over the world are designing, implementing, and evaluating. They represent the wide range of informatics development in different regions. The way these Proceedings are edited is emblematic of our field: the collaboration needed to produce a top-quality publication, even in the absence of a dedicated staff or a large budget, is only possible because reaching our destination is more important than the few barriers that present themselves along the way. The Proceedings are the output of a large group of volunteers who receive a small token of appreciation and are rewarded by knowing that, because of their contributions, authors disseminate their work beyond regional boundaries and readers within and outside our field can learn and reuse tools, data, and knowledge.

It was our great pleasure and honor to work with Associate Editors Todd Lingren and Scott McGrath to produce these Proceedings. They coordinated a large group of informatics trainees from multiple institutions (Table 1) in order to ensure that the contents were easy to read and formatted uniformly. We thank the whole editorial team as well as the Scientific Program team for making the editing role a fun and enjoyable one. And we thank our readers for understanding the difficulties in editing a large number of accepted papers for clarity, grammar, and style in such a short amount of time.

These Proceedings feature state-of-the-art informatics projects from multiple regions of the world. Enjoy learning how informatics is changing the way we approach health and wellbeing for all.

Table 1 – Editorial Committee Members

Marcy Antonio / University of Arizona, USA

Jacqueline Brixey / University of Southern California, USA

Melissa M. Das / MaineHealth, USA

Smruti Deoghare / University of Cincinnati, USA

Grace Gao / University of Minnesota, USA

Mattias Georgsson / Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

Zhe He / Florida State University, USA

Renee Marie Hendricks / Veterans Health Administration, USA

Felix Holl / Ulm University, Germany

Kate Fultz Hollis / Oregon Health & Science University, USA

Hyunggu Jung / University of Washington, USA

Tian Kang / Columbia University, USA

Emily Kawaler / New York University, USA

David Leander / Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, USA

Tiffany I. Leung / Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Lacey Lewis / Veterans Health Administration, USA

Elizabeth A. Lindemann / University of Minnesota, USA

Todd Lingren / University of Cincinnati, USA

Satish M. Mahajan / Veterans Health Administration, USA

Vincent Major / New York University, USA

Scott McGrath / University of Nebraska Omaha, USA

Melanie Meyer / University of Massachusetts, USA

Sean Mikles / University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA

Elliot Mitchell / Columbia University, USA

Vickie Nguyen / University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA

Florence Odekunle / Rutgers University, USA

Adebowale Ojo / Center for Disease Control and Prevention, USA

Lisiane Pruinelli / University of Minnesota, USA

Satyajeet Raje / IBM, USA

Doug Redd / George Washington University, USA

Lincoln Sheets / University of Missouri, USA

Bryan Steitz / Vanderbilt University, USA

Vignesh Subbian / University of Arizona, USA

Lina Sulieman / Vanderbilt University, USA

Andreas Triantafyllidis / Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Greece

Elizabeth Umberfield / University of Michigan, USA

Jacob P. VanHouten / Vanderbilt University Medical Center, USA

Lois Walters-Threat / American Nurses Credentialing Center, USA

Wei Wei / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, USA

Rafeek Adeyemi Yusuf / University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA

Ling Zheng / Monmouth University, USA

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD

Brigitte Seroussi, MD, PhD

Co-Chairs, MedInfo2019 Editorial Committee