Background: Health information technologies (HITs) such as electronic health records (EHR) and telemedicine services are currently used to assist clinicians provide care to patients. There are many barriers to HIT adoption, including mismatches between investments and benefits, disruptions in the workflow, and concerns about privacy and confidentiality. The lack of HIT training of health professionals as a workforce is an increasingly recognized and understudied barrier. Objective: The purpose of this study is to describe what courses on HIT topics are available at the graduate level for future health professionals in the European Union (EU) and to explore possible determining factors for their exposure to these courses. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study of EU medical schools was performed to explore the prevalence of HIT courses. The curricula of all identified higher learning institutions that offer a medical degree were manually explored to identify graduate-level courses that offer specific training on HIT topics. HIT topics were defined as courses or subjects that provided knowledge on the design, development, use, and implementation of HIT. Associations among potential factors such as population, yearly medical graduates, total number of physicians, EHR presence, and gross domestic product (GDP) were explored. Results: A total of 302 medical schools from the 28 member states of the EU were explored. Only about one-third (90/302, 29.80%) of all medical degree curricula offered any kind of HIT course at the graduate level; in the medical schools that offered HIT courses, the courses were often mandatory (58/90, 64.44%). In most EU countries, HIT courses are offered in less than half of the medical schools, regardless of the country’s GDP per capita. Countries with the highest percentages of HIT course presence have the lowest GDP per capita. There seems to be a weak inverse correlation (–0.49) between the two variables (GDP per capita and HIT course presence). There is a trend between the availability of medical human resources and an increase in the presence of HIT courses, with Romania, Croatia, and Greece as outliers in this respect. Conclusions: The current state of medical training in the EU leaves much room for improvement. Further studies are required for in-depth analysis of the content and manner of instruction that would fit present and future needs of HIT.

Ontologies serve as a one of the formal means to represent and model knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, system engineering and other related disciplines. Ontologies within requirements engineering may be used for formal representation of system requirements. In the Internet of Things, ontologies may be used to represent sensor knowledge and describe acquired data semantics. Designing an ontology comprehensive enough with an appropriate level of knowledge expressiveness, serving multiple purposes, from system requirements specifications to modeling knowledge based on data from IoT sensors, is one of the great challenges. This paper proposes an approach towards ontology-based requirements engineering for well-being, aging and health supported by the Internet of Things. Such an ontology design does not aim at creating a new ontology, but extending the appropriate one already existing, SAREF4EHAW, in order align with the well-being, aging and health concepts and structure the knowledge within the domain. Other contributions include a conceptual formulation for Well-Being, Aging and Health and a related taxonomy, as well as a concept of One Well-Being, Aging and Health. New attributes and relations have been proposed for the new ontology extension, along with the updated list of use cases and particular ontological requirements not covered by the original ontology. Future work envisions full specification of the new ontology extension, as well as structuring system requirements and sensor measurement parameters to follow description logic.

Background: Connected health (CH), as a new paradigm, manages individual and community health in a holistic manner by leveraging a variety of technologies and has the potential for the incorporation of telehealth and integrated care services, covering the whole spectrum of health-related services addressing healthy subjects and chronic patients. The reorganization of services around the person or citizen has been expected to bring high impact in the health care domain. There are a series of concerns (eg, contextual factors influencing the impact of care models, the cost savings associated with CH solutions, and the sustainability of the CH ecosystem) that should be better addressed for CH technologies to reach stakeholders more successfully. Overall, there is a need to effectively establish an understanding of the concepts of CH impact. As services based on CH technologies go beyond standard clinical interventions and assessments of medical devices or medical treatments, the need for standardization and for new ways of measurements and assessments emerges when studying CH impact. Objective: This study aimed to introduce the CH impact framework (CHIF) that serves as an approach to assess the impact of CH services. Methods: This study focused on the subset of CH comprising services that directly address patients and citizens on the management of disease or health and wellness. The CHIF was developed through a multistep procedure and various activities. These included, as initial steps, a literature review and workshop focusing on knowledge elicitation around CH concepts. Then followed the development of the initial version of the framework, refining of the framework with the experts as a result of the second workshop, and, finally, composition and deployment of a questionnaire for preliminary feedback from early-stage researchers in the relevant domains. Results: The framework contributes to a better understanding of what is CH impact and analyzes the factors toward achieving it. CHIF elaborates on how to assess impact in CH services. These aspects can contribute to an impact-aware design of CH services. It can also contribute to a comparison of CH services and further knowledge of the domain. The CHIF is based on 4 concepts, including CH system and service outline, CH system end users, CH outcomes, and factors toward achieving CH impact. The framework is visualized as an ontological model. Conclusions: The CHIF is an initial step toward identifying methodologies to objectively measure CH impact while recognizing its multiple dimensions and scales.

Internet of Things aims to simplify and automate complicated tasks by using sensors and other inputs for collecting huge amounts of data, processing them in the cloud and on the edge networks, and allowing decision making toward further interactions via actuators and other outputs. As connected IoT devices rank in billions, semantic interoperability remains one of the permanent challenges, where ontologies can provide a great contribution. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the state of research on semantic interoperability in well-being, aging, and health IoT services by using ontologies. This was achieved by analyzing the following research questions: “Which IoT ontologies have been used to implement well-being, aging and health services?” and “What is the dominant approach to achieve semantic interoperability of IoT solutions for well-being, aging and health?’ We conducted a scoping literature review of research papers from 2013 to 2024 by applying the PRISMA-ScR meta-analysis methodology with a custom-built software tool for an exhaustive search through the following digital libraries: IEEE Xplore, PubMed, MDPI, Elsevier ScienceDirect, and Springer Nature Link. By thoroughly analyzing 30 studies from an initial pool of more than 80,000 studies, we conclude that IoT ontologies for well-being, aging, and health services increasingly adopt Semantic Web of Things standards to achieve semantic interoperability by integrating heterogeneous data through unified semantic models. Emerging approaches, like semantic communication, Large Language Models Edge Intelligence, and sustainability-driven IoT analytics, can further enhance service efficiency and promote a holistic “One Well-Being, Aging, and Health” framework.

Purpose: Prevention and detection of cyber threats in health care is known to be suboptimal, yet even less attention has been paid to building resilience and developing incident response and recovery plans for situations when disruptive cyber attacks such as ransomware or terrorist events, occur. Recognising this, the World Health Organization has called for the development of guidance on clinical incident response planning that addresses how health care organisations should respond to cyber attacks. Design/methodology/approach: In this narrative review, we present key strategic and policy frameworks as well as recommendations and shared experiences from the literature to help health organisations build cybersecurity preparedness and resilience. On 30th April 2025, we searched without date, language or geographical restrictions in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore and EBM Reviews. A total of 51 relevant documents were included in the review. Findings: Careful advance planning, practicing and training in the form of tabletop scenarios or simulations, and implementing the principles of gamification can markedly reduce the disruptive impact of realised threats. Approaches to cybersecurity preparedness and resilience must be proactive and led by dedicated, certified teams, fully supported by top executives and enabled by compliance across staff. Pre-planning for efficient communication is needed not only within the targeted health care organisation but also across the health care sector and between sectors. Originality/value: An overview of the current best evidence to inform efforts towards strengthening cybersecurity preparedness and resilience in health care organisations.