Happy Birthday JMIR: Call for Papers 20th Anniversary Issue

Happy Birthday: 20 Years of JMIR

In August 1999 we published the very first issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), pioneering a new type of journal for an emerging field – originally, JMIR's scope was the use of the Internet and related technologies as an enabler and infrastructure for health innovations, although todays' scope of digital medicine or digital health goes well beyond "the Internet", and includes emerging technologies such as 3D printing, games, wearables, and home sensors, etc. (all technologies that would be unthinkable without the Internet as infrastructure foundation). 

The field went through several name changes – what we first called “cybermedicine” was later called “eHealth” (electronic health), then came “cHealth” (connected health), and these days people sometimes use “digital health” or “digital medicine” (despite Twitter length restrictions) – but the underlying ideas remain the same: The use of information and communication technologies and the web helps to empower patients (not least through peer-to-peer communications), provides a platform for communication, clinical information and telemedicine (these days often through mobile devices), and revolutionizes information access and medical education [1]. While most medical informatics journals focused on clinical informatics, hospital IT and electronic health records, JMIR recognized the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of emerging technologies outside of traditional health care settings.  

We were not only innovating on content, but also on form. And as we wrote 20 years ago, “As publishers of a journal about the Internet, we are also dedicated to using and experimenting with the Internet as a medium itself.” [1] – and experimented we have: We were the first open access electronic-only journal in medical informatics or even medicine (pre-dating BioMed Central and PloS), we were the first to mine “tweetations” from Twitter to calculate what is now known as “altmetrics”, we were the first journal offering a fast-track payment option for guaranteed decision making within 3 weeks, we experimented with web archiving cited webpages (WebCite), we were one of the first journals openly crediting reviewers by name (and now rewarding them with Karma credits), we pioneered new ways of knowledge dissemination through social media and cofounded TrendMD, and we continue to experiment with open peer-review, preprints, registered reports and even crowdfunding.

Today, JMIR Publications publishes 30 journals, has a modern Google-like office at Toronto’s waterfront, has a staff of 20, and was just named one of Canada’s top 500 companies.

Four of our journals have an impact factor (ranging from 3.2 to 5), and are ranked among the top 8 medical informatics journals.

20th Anniversary Special Issue – Call for Papers 

To celebrate our milestone and exit from the teenage years, we are preparing a special issue, to be published at the end of 2019. This special issue will consist mainly of invited papers written by leaders in the field, but we are also soliciting papers from the academic community. 

This will be an unusual high-profile issue that will be widely disseminated with press releases and as a special print publication at conferences.

We specifically encourage papers (reviews, viewpoints) that comment on major developments from the past 20 years or provide an outlook on the possibilities or challenges of digital health for the next 20 years. We also welcome high-quality original research or systematic reviews. Possible topics for viewpoint papers or reviews could be “Where will we be in 20 years – what will health care look like in 2039?”, or “What is the biggest achievement or research breakthrough in the past 20 years?”. 

We would like to have the submission by September 15, 2019, although we may be able to make arrangements to extend this deadline. Contributions will be peer-reviewed. 

Potential authors interested in submitting should file a pre-submission enquiry by sending an email with the subject line “20th anniversary article proposal” to ed-support@jmir.org outlining their paper idea (title and abstract). 

All article processing charges will be waived for papers appearing in the 20th Anniversary Issue.

Invited authors (as of August 21, 2019):

Alex Jadad	From a digital bottle: A message to our selves in 2039
Enrico Coiera	The last mile: The challenge of bringing digital health into real-world settings
Paul Wicks	The rise and fall of online patient communities
Bertalan Mesko	The art of medicine in the era of artificial intelligence
John Powell	Trust me I’m a chatbot: Why AI in healthcare won’t pass the Turing test
Danny Sands	Title TBD
Dave DeBronkart	Open access as revolution: Knowledge alters power
Susan Michie	On the dimensional structure of engagement with digital behaviour change interventions (DBCIs): Psychometric evaluation of the ‘DBCI Engagement Scale’)
Jeremy Wyatt	Title TBD
Tricia Greenhalgh	Infrastructure revisited: Ethnographic case study and (re)theorisation of the ‘installed base’ of healthcare IT
John Torous	A systematic review of smartphone apps for prodromal and early course psychosis and schizophrenia Beyond impact factor: JMIR's 20 years of engaging and encouraging high-quality digital health research from diverse authors
Bradford Hesse	The internet’s role in solving the last mile problem in medicine
Kenneth Mandl	TBD
Helen Christensen	TBD
Laurie Buis	Implementation: The next giant hurdle to clinical transformation
Qing Zeng, Stuart Nelson	Will AI translate big data into improved medical care or be a source of confusing intrusion? – A discussion between a physician and a medical informatics researcher
Rita Kukafka	Digital health citizens on the road to the future
Renato M.E. Sabbatini	Federated intelligence, the internet and medical decision-making
Ricky Leung	TBD

   

Call for Video Submissions

Alternatively (or additionally) we are inviting short video messages from researchers, authors, editors, and reviewers, commenting on the impact of JMIR on the field or you personally, or just wishing us happy birthday. We will be accepting video clips recorded by you, but we are also happy to have an interview with you over Skype. If you do not have time to write an article, providing comments in a short video or interview might be a good option. Snippets from the videos will be distributed through our social media channels (such as Twitter and YouTube), and some might even be published in the 20th anniversary theme issue. You can reflect on (or we can interview you) about your own research, or on a topic of your choosing. 

Submit a Quote

As a final option we are soliciting succinct quotes from researchers and the public which we may use in an editorial for the anniversary issue. Authors of these quotes will be credited and we may use their headshots as well.
We are seeking your 1-3 sentence answers to the following questions:

• What significant developments happened in the past 20 years, e.g. what is the biggest achievement or research breakthrough in the past 20 years?

• Where will we be in 20 years – what will health care look like in 2039?

If you want to contribute in this part of the anniversary issue, please answer at least one of these questions in this form before Sept 15, 2019.
If you have more to say about this then please consider submitting a full viewpoint article instead (see above).
References

1. Eysenbach G. Welcome to the Journal of Medical Internet Research. J Med Internet Res 1999;1(1):e5; URL: https://www.jmir.org/1999/1/e5 DOI: 10.2196/jmir.1.1.e5.

eHealth Ontario Watch how access to diagnostic images and reports benefits health care providers and their patients

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Digital Health Success Stories

Diagnostic images and reports from across the province now available to health care providers With the recent launch of the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) Common Service, health care providers can now view diagnostic images and reports performed at facilities across the province, in one place.  In August, the service was made available to all authorized users in the Greater Toronto Area as well as in northern and eastern Ontario through the ConnectingOntario ClinicalViewer.  It’s also now available at two hospital organizations in south west Ontario, providing additional patient data to ClinicalConnect users who currently see reports and images and produced within their own region, and is being rolled out to more sites in the coming months. Thanks to this integration, health care providers can now obtain a more complete picture of their patient’s health, regardless of their location.   Watch the video above to see how health care providers like Dr. Koff benefit by having quick access to their patients’ diagnostic images and reports. This helps to eliminate the need for patients to carry around CD’s containing their DI information to specialist’s offices. It also eliminates the need to mail or fax test results, and the costly duplication of scans. Most importantly for patients, this network allows specialists at one facility to access images performed at other locations, allowing for more informed, timely medical decisions.

Help Us Share This Story Help others see firsthand how our work today is enhancing delivery of patient care in Ontario. Our mission is to foster an electronic health care system that puts the patient first, by leveraging existing systems and building new ones to connect health care providers with their patients' medical information.

Eric Topols's NIH grant for Precision Medicine & Health Informatics Research

I have tried to read Eric Topol's classic books on digital medicine:  "The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands" and the "Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Healthcare" but my local libraries don't seem to carry them. Not in the habit of buying every book I want to read on Amazon. I think Dr. Topol was a keynote at a nearby eHealth conference not long ago. Instead of attending, I subscribed to his Twitter feed which is well worth a look if you are not already inundated with more information feeds than a human could possibly digest in one lifetime.

The biggest news to come from Dr. Topol I may have first read in the San Diego Union Tribune, a news source I normally would never dream of reading, but for various disparate reasons (or algorithms) came to my attention from sundry WWW news sources. In fact I probably first read about it on the good doctors' Twitter posts.  Here is the link to the San Diego article, but it soon became apparent that the RSS was broadly distributed internationally. The Scripps Translational Research Institute, where Professor Topol works, just happens to be in San Diego:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/jul/06/NIH-scripps-topol/

The NIH doesn't often dole out $120 million grants for research. The last I heard of a grant with that largess was for research on the artificial brain, and I even blogged about that.  What I have not blogged about is precision medicine, which is defined well in this NIH Medline Plus article.  I am kind of wondering if precision medicine is just a plain English way of saying translational bioinformatics and health informatics all rolled into one.

This research project, that involves tapping into the blood samples, DNA, social media, health apps, sensor data, Big Data analytics and health records of a million volunteers, reminds me of  The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. It certainly does bring to mind a classic in health informatics and epidemiologial research - The Framingham Heart Study of 1948 - which is still providing data for researchers. One can only imagine how the data generated from this research will be analyzed sixty years from now. Artificial Intelligence tools like IBM Watson and Alpha Go, which will probably be employed to help the data scientists, are just in the teething stage, compared to what their exponential computer grandchildren will be able to byte off.

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: Learn online or from an actual human teacher?

Around 40 years ago, I studied with one of the greatest Tai Chi Ch'uan masters of the last century,  Cheng Man-ch'ing. The thing is, I never studied with him in person. I had his book, which was illustrated with photographs of him doing the movements; The Golden Pheasant Stands On One Leg, Grasp The Sparrow's Tail, The Crane Spreads It's Wings, Step Forward to the Seven Stars of the Dipper, Snake Creeps Down, The Fairy Weaving at the Shuttle, etc. By looking in a mirror I thought I was able to string together a series of movements. Wrong!  I was only twisting and hurting my back and other places doing the exercises. Seven years later I met a Tai Chi Ch'uan teacher and the realization that this ancient art can only be learned by being passed down from teacher to student.

That was before the age of the ubiquitous computer. Nowadays I can watch Tai Chi instructional videos on Youtube all day. I can even switch to other physical activities and watch instructional videos about how to improve my tennis forehand. Ultimately though, I need to really practice the actual art or sport in order to derive any benefit. To really improve at all I should practice with a teacher or coach. There comes a time when we do need to meet human instructors in person to really learn. This is especially true for some of the physiotherapy exercises you can watch on Youtube because I think it is be better to have a physiotherapist prescribe the exercises.  I do know a Tai Chi practitioner who learned the Chan form of Tai Chi by watching videos he had borrowed. He was exceptional in that he already knew and practiced many other of the Tai Chi forms. And this brings me to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) learning online.

Before I comment about what it is like to learn MBSR online, let's look at the movie the Matrix. If you have seen the movie, you know that when Neo was hooked-up into the Matrix, he learned and later mastered Kung-fu, in addition to several other martial arts, at the speed of digital data transfer and integration into programming. That would be the epitome of hooked-up online learning. The next computerized training ground, that is not science fiction, maybe be Oculus Rift, a newer virtual reality headset that brings into visual perception an immersion experience of three dimensions.

It wasn't that long ago, virtually since the dawn of the WWW, when educators had to face the dilemma of evaluating whether or not one can learn just as well by studying online as one could in a classroom. We can see now how technology, even in science fiction, has grown exponentially to make online learning as common as the air that we breath. That is why before MOOCs there were online courses where you could even get a BA or a college diploma - a real one - without almost seeing a human in person. These initial studies had to look at usability, user interface and digital literacy. They had to research even cognitive measures, how the mind pays attention to a screen, visual studies on effects on the eyes, even worries about the health effects of Wi-Fi wireless transmissions. Anyway, eLearning has made it's mark, and it is going to stick around for a long time.

I have been practicing meditation for many years so I knew about MBSR and the research that has been developed on meditation in neuroscience and medicine. There have been research studies on the effectiveness of meditation not only from Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of MBSR, but also from Herbert Benson, Richard Davidson, and so many others. I knew that the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (in picture here at left) was in Davidson's fMRI and EEG studies on compassion and the meditating brain.  Just yesterday a new article on the benefits of MBSR and Tai Chi exercise for healing those surviving from breast cancer appeared on the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence website.  Cheng Man-ch'ing is smiling and proven right again, as Tai Chi really helped helped him recover from illness.

I have admired the work Jon Kabat-Zinn for many years, though I had never studied his works - until now. I am e-Learning my way through a free online 8 week course based on MBSR, about how it was developed and delivered, as well as the benefits for health that the research has shown.  Before I only knew about the benefits his teachings were having on those in palliative care or who were diagnosed with chronic illness - the meditation as healing medicine model - stress is the silent killer.  I also liked the secular, or one might say, the scientific approach. Now that I have been taking the MBSR course, I really have no qualms about doing so without a human for guidance. This is mostly due to my own experience and learning from meditation teachers, going on retreats, reading, and doing daily practice. I have also studied Buddhism in India, Nepal and Korea. Can't really say that I ever learned meditation before through an online interface. Call me misguided if you will, but I trust my instincts. Well, I did learn Vipassana in a semi-remote sort of way.

Many of the basic techniques in MBSR come from a meditation practice called Vipassana, or insight meditation. The main focus is on watching the breath or mindful awareness of breathing, called Anapanasati in Sanskrit. I did an 11 day Vipassana retreat in Massachusetts taught by S. N. Goenka from Burma. He was not there, but he may as well have been, because they used videos and tapes in the meditation hall to present the instructions. He has many other centres around the world. I thought it was very effective, even though my previous experience with meditation teaching was  learning discipline by sitting at the feet of the masters. This is the main reason why I feel confident in doing an 8 week online MBSR course. Another reason is that the course is exceptionally well designed with guided meditations, readings, video instructions, research articles, teachers with lots of experience- the whole works.  I will provide the link to The MBSR online course that I am following at the end of this post. The online course I am taking is free, but I have looked around and seen some that are not. That 11 day Vipassana course I took in Massachusetts, which including a place to sleep and food, was also free. You give "dana" according to what you think you can.

Generally speaking I would always advise studying with a human presence for a traditional discipline that has been past down for generations, if not millennium. The Tibetan people call the Dali Lama "Kundun", which means "The Presence". Call me a conservative in this respect, but there are just too many subtle things that can go wrong without the guidance of a teacher. On the other hand, I am very, very impressed with the secular or scientific approach of Kabat-Zinn in the design and delivery of the MBSR course.  It would be great however to take the course from him or some of his qualified fellow instructors in person, and I have looked around and there centers and courses locally where it is taught. It is all over the map now.

One criticism I have is learning some basic yoga exercises online, which is one part of the overall MBSR program. Listening or watching videos of yoga postures, and trying to follow along, creates risks of injury, for practitioners of any age. Injury can happen even in a center where a teacher is present, but the presence of the teacher is more reassuring. Learning dynamic movements or mental training is not like reading a book; it is immersive, interactive and interpersonal.  When I was trying to learn Tai Chi Ch'uan from the Cheng Man-ch'ing book by looking in a mirror, I developed aches and pains from unusual twisting of my body. Something similar is happening as I am lying on the floor receiving audio instructions on yoga postures. OK, maybe blame myself for not being careful.  I heard once that physiotherapists are getting a lot of business from people who are just taking up yoga. There are a lot of not so qualified instructors out there. To be fair, there may also be a lot of people who may not have realistic expectations about how to train properly and do not know their limits.

In fact after I took the MBSR online course and kindly received my certificate, Dave Potter changed the yoga links to emphasis watching the videos over listening to the audio. Hopefully this will make remote learning easier for people, who may not have the added benefit of prior experience doing yoga or having an instructor or someone with experience for guidance.

The online MBSR course I am taking is here:
http://palousemindfulness.com/selfguidedMBSR.html