The chance to share the newest artificial intelligence and healthcare research brought attendees from all over the globe to Orlando in early June for the 12th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2024). The prestigious meeting started with six technical workshops and ended three days later with a third keynote by Jens Kleesiek, professor of translational image-guided oncology at Germany’s Institute for AI in Medicine. The other two keynote speeches featured Jessica Ancker from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, and Zhiyong Lu from the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.
The University of Florida’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) provided the bulk of organizational support for this conference. The three general co-chairs of ICHI 2024 were Jiang Bian, HOBI; Yi Guo, HOBI; and Zhe He, Florida State University. The meeting’s largest sponsor was the Cancer Informatics Shared Resource of the UF Health Cancer Center. The National Science Foundation sponsored the doctorial travel award and its consortium with more than a dozen student research presentations.
For the first time, the event hosted a Women in Healthcare Informatics gathering. At a banquet, awards were given for the top papers, posters and doctoral projects. A HOBI team won Best Poster Award, Runner Up, for the poster “Prediction of Follow Up for Oncology Patients Discharged to Skilled Nursing Facilities Using Machine Learning.” The poster authors were Ziyi Chen, Tianshi Liu, Yonghui Wu, Yi Guo, Jonathan Chatzkel and Jiang Bian.
The general co-chairs were especially appreciative of the support from Peggy Ford, the local arrangement chair, Jie Xu, the financial chair, and HOBI student volunteers Yongqiu Li, Shuang Yang, Chengkun Sun, and Jinqian Pan. Other involved HOBI faculty included the following:
- Mei Liu, Analytics Track Chair
- Xing He, Web Chair/Poster and Demonstration Chair
- Rui Yin, Tutorial Chair
- Qianqian Song, Sponsorship Chair
The Publicity Chair was Mattia Prosperi, UF College of Public Health, and the Workshops Chair was Lisiane Pruinelli, UF College of Nursing.
Often held aboard, this conference was last held in Florida in 2012 in Miami. Next June, the IEEE ICHI 2025 will be held in Italy.