Guest Editorial IEEE BHI 2017

The IEEE International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) is a special topic conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEEEMBS). BHI2017 was co-located with the annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Rosen Plaza Hotel, Orlando, Florida, USA during Feb. 16-19, 2017. The focus of BHI2017 was on "informatics for personalized, precision and preventive healthcare." Advancing health informatics has been identified as a grand challenge for engineering in the 21st century by the National Academy of Engineering. Managing and improving human health will require novel and creative informatics solutions to accelerate scientific discovery, translate innovations into successful treatments, re-engineer care practices and infrastructure, all with effective use of hardware and software. BHI2017 provided a unique forum showcasing enabling technologies in both methodology and clinical advancement in data/information acquisition, transmission, storage, retrieval, visualization, processing, analysis, interpretation and validation. In addition, it demonstrated how integrative informatics solutions can be employed in novel clinical applications, and how the deployment of integrated bioinformatics, with the support of Internet of Things (IoT), can facilitate precision and preventive medicine. In this special issue, six papers are selected to exhibit recent development in areas highlighted in BHI2017. The papers are briefly summarized here.