An international conference addressing information technology and communication in health (ITCH) will be held February 26 – March 1, 2015 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Professor Stephen Hawking’s statement, “we learned to talk, we learned to listen, we unleashed imagination” provides the motivation for this year’s conference.

The main conference themes are:

1. Patients Talking
2. The Profession Listening
3. Services Unleashing the Imagination

Patients are encouraged to submit papers that provide their own stories and insights. Concern is not the formal style, but descriptions of how patients can communicate with clinicians. Most importantly, we are interested in your ideas.

Conference Website: http://www.uvic.ca/hsd/itch/index.php

Instructions for Patient Perspective Papers

Information Technology and Communication in Health (ITCH) 2015 will explore patient-centered health care. Papers from patients themselves would be especially welcome. Concern is not the formal style, but descriptions of how patients can communicate with clinicians and planners, via their own stories and insights. Topics may include:

• The patient’s role in care
• Use of patient data by patients themselves

What should be in my paper?

Most importantly, we are interested in your ideas. There are some additional pieces of information that we’d like to have as well.   A sample first page of a paper is included on the next page so you can see what it would look like.

• A title for your paper (Ex. What a Patient Wants – Show Me the Data!)
• Your name (FirstName LastName). If you are writing this paper with friends, please include all the authors separating their names by commas (Ex. Daffy Duck, Minnie Maus, Michael Mouse).
• Your city, Your country (Ex. Victoria, Canada).If you have multiple authors with multiple home locations, please include them in the same order as the authors separated by a comma (Ex. Hollywood, USA, Orlando, USA, Paris, France)
• Your contact information (Ex. A mailing address or email contact or both), only one author needs to provide contact information
• A abstract or a short, one paragraph summary of the main ideas in your paper
• Your ideas for the paper. You may want to use headings to emphasize your main ideas.
• The Editorial Committee will put your paper in the proper formatting style for publication if your paper is accepted. We do request that you use the simplified paper formatting instructions below to make our work easier and to make sure your paper is an appropriate length.

Simplified Paper Formatting:

• MS Word document
• Letter paper size
• 1 inch or 2.54 cm margins on all sides
• Times New Roman font
• Font size should be 12 point for all of your text (titles and headings included)
• Single spaced lines
• English language
• 5 page limit

Deadline:   Sep­ember 15, 2014

Website for submission:  https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=itch2015

• Please follow the instructions on the web site for submitting your paper.
• Please be sure to categorize your paper as a Patient Perspective paper.

Sample First Page

What a Patient Wants – Show Me the Data!

 By:     Daffy Duck, Minnie Maus, Michael Mouse

From:   Hollywood, USA, Orlando, USA, Paris, France

 Contact information: Daffy Duck, 1 Star Lane, Hollywood, CA 90210, USA, dduck@inet.com

Abstract:  In this paper, we share about how seeing our own data has made a big difference in we manage our own health day after day. We also will talk about how giving us too much data all at one time or not providing an explanation of what it means is almost as frustrating as not having any data at all. We also discuss our different preferences for paper and electronic style data.

Daffy’s Story

I was lucky. When I asked about how to organize my kid’s immunization stuff, my doctor gave me the instructions for how to get into our family’s medical records online….

** If you will be including pictures, images, etc. in your paper, please contact us so we can help you with those special formats. We want to make sure they appear the way you want them to and the way the publisher wants them.

** If you use books, articles or web sites as references in your paper, please contact us for formatting help.

Have questions?

Please contact us at: itch@uvic.ca