This book presents the proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Health Informatics meets Digital Health (dHealth 2022), held in Vienna, Austria, on May 24–25, 2022. In keeping with its interdisciplinary mission, the conference series provides a platform for researchers and decision makers, health professionals, healthcare providers, governmental and industry representatives to discuss innovative digital health solutions to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare using digital technologies.

Students from various flavours of health informatics courses are also a very important target group for the conference, both as attendees to complement their education in the respective tertiary teaching schools and as presenters in the student competition. We consider it crucial to help to engage the next generation to become digital-health developers, architects, facilitators, pioneers, innovators, managers, entrepreneurs, and evangelists.

The 42 papers included here provide an insight into the state-of-the-art of different aspects of dHealth, including the design and evaluation of user interfaces, patient-centred solutions, electronic health/medical/patient records, machine learning in healthcare and biomedical data analytics. Therefore, the book offers the reader an interdisciplinary view of the state-of-the-art and of ongoing research activities in digital health.

In 2019, we decided to change the name of the conference from eHealth to dHealth to emphasise that the healthcare of the future will become ever more data-driven, decision-supporting, deep, or simply more digital. And indeed, since then new “digital” terms have emerged and became an integral part of the way digital health professionals speak and write. One example is “digital therapeutics”.

This is reasonable, since it supports the evolution of the field, its differentiation and specialisation. It is also a sign of maturation, and this trend will probably continue for a few more years, with a constant stream of new terms spinning off from the “digital” stem, until a new lead term emerges. Today, no one knows when and what that term will be, but we will do our best to capture and cultivate the semantic future of our field in the context of this and subsequent dHealth conferences. So please stay tuned!

Graz, Hall in Tyrol, Vienna, May 2022

Günter Schreier (AIT)

Bernhard Pfeifer (UMIT)

Martin Baumgartner (AIT)

Dieter Hayn (AIT)