Personal health informatics. Editorial.

OBJECTIVES: To provide an editorial introduction to the 2012 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics with an overview of its contents and contributors.

METHODS: A brief overview of the main theme, and an outline of the purposes, contents, format, and acknowledgment of contributions for the 2012 IMIA Yearbook.

RESULTS: This 2012 issue of the IMIA Yearbook highlights important developments in personal health informatics, impacting the activities in research, education and practice in this interdisciplinary field. There has been steady progress towards introducing individualization or personalization into informatics systems by taking advantage of the increasing amounts of personal information that is relevant to medical decisions and application in clinical practice. At the same time, there are serious issues about the limits of existing systems being able to effectively personalize information within both practical and ethical constraints so critical to the practice of medicine. Recent literature bearing on these questions includes the selected papers published during the past 12 months, and articles reported by IMIA Working Groups on these topics.

CONCLUSION: Surveys of the main research sub-fields in biomedical informatics in the Yearbook provide an overview of progress and current challenges across the spectrum of the discipline, focusing on the challenges and opportunities involved in personal health informatics.