Jana Zvarova Memorial Conference 2018, Prague, Czech Republic, May 4th, 2018.

In Prague on 4th May 2018 was organized Special Topic Conference dedicated to acknowledging and honoring of Prof. Jana Zvárová, founder and Editor in Chief of both this European Journal for Biomedical Informatics and the International Journal on Biomedicine and Healthcare, who suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in July 2017.

Prof. Zvárová was one of pioneers of Biomedical Informatics in former countries of “Eastern block”(former socialistic countries) of the World (1-6).

In the Editorial of special issue of the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics edited by professors Bernd Blobel and Arie Hasman, as Guest Editors, published on-line in this journal on April 30th 2018, Bernd and Arie expressed their opinions and some facts about her, as they said, “unforgettable friend and colleague” Jana Zvarova (EJBI. 2018; 14(2): 1-2) (3):

Jana Zvarova “was an extraordinary personality, who influenced the development and improvement of health and social care by means of medical informatics, biomathematics and biostatistics as well as epidemiology both nationally and globally. She dedicated her excellent work based on a broad education and huge practical experience to the benefit of patients and health professionals, but first of all to teaching undergraduate, PhD and PostDoc students from the Czech Republic as well as other countries, acknowledging the importance of educating and training current and future staff for best serving the community. Due to this engagement Jana Zvárová received a big number of awards, fellowships, medals, etc. during her professional life that lasted until her last breath. Frequently in cooperation with the Editors, authors and other colleagues, Jana Zvárová has organized quite a number of conferences and educational events covering such diverse topics as biomathematics, biostatistics, medical informatics, eHealth, mobile health, medical documentation, EHR systems, clinical decision support, interoperability challenges and related standards, but also clinical, social and legal aspects. At EuroMISE and also later at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Charles University Prague (launched in 2006, based on an agreement between the Charles University Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences) lecture series on advanced eHealth, knowledge representation and management, medical and clinical guidelines, ontologies, EHR systems and interoperability were organized by Jana. With the establishment of the EuroMISE Mentor Association (EMA) in 2013, mentoring courses addressing regular and PhD students were organized in cooperation and coordination with, and on the topic of, some of those international conferences organized in Prague. Jana Zvárová specifically supported the series of International HL7 Interoperability Conferences (IHIC) by giving them a publication platform at the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics” (3).

Mentioned topics from some of the fields Jana was interested has been presented at Special Topic Jana Zvarova Memorial 2018 Conference in Prague, held on May 4th of the 2018. Almost all presented contributions invited speakers, and distinguished Medical Informatics experts and academics, friends of Jana Zvarova, and also some of them, former teachers of Charles University EuroMise center, chaired by professor Jana Zvarova.

Presentations at this STC are printed in Special Issue of the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics and were visible on-line before the day of CTC (www.jbi.org) (4-6).

This volume starts with an obituary for Jana Zvárová. George Mihalas, Vice-Chair of the History Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) acknowledges and honors her professional life and achievements. Further contributions in this volume specifically address in more or less detail cooperation with Jana Zvárová in the context of electronic healthcare documentation, EHR systems, interoperability, knowledge management and decision support, educational challenges, but also the role of women in the domain of health informatics. Bernd Blobel discusses requirements, standards and solutions for interoperable EHR systems with some focus on user perspectives, thereby also referring to earlier papers with a more technical focus. Elske Ammenwerth addresses the transformation of the patient into a responsible care manager by assessing the role of patient portals for empowering them. The analysis emphasizes the situation in Austria, but also considers the aspects in general. Jan Kalina discusses the challenges of Big Data analysis in medicine. He illustrates the complexity reduction of highdimensional data with practical research problems such as face recognition and gene analysis. František Och presents the project “Comprehensive assessment of the clinical effect of specifically selected natural remedies on the treatment of knee osteoarthritis” Jana Zvárová was strongly involved in. In that context he presents the interdisciplinary challenge of evidence-based medicine in balneology as initiated by Jana. Lenka Lhotska discusses the evolution of decision support systems in healthcare, specifically highlighting the role of distributed systems and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Izet Masic focuses on the field Jana Zvárová was especially engaged in: education in medical informatics, biostatistics and related domains and applications. He specifically highlights the situation in his home country Bosnia-Herzegovina under the perspective of the Bologna Process. Pirkko Nykänen summarizes the investigations on the specific role and achievements of women in health informatics. Diane Whitehouse finally reports about conversations with Prof. Jana Zvárová on contemporary developments in digital health In the addendum of this Jana Zvárová Special Issue of the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics, we republish the official obituary of IMIA and EFMI concerning Jana Zvárová, which appeared first in the IMIA Newsletter 82 from July 2017.

It was very nice to see some of very close friends of Jana Zvarova in Prague, at the University were Jana started long time ago as young mathematician and statistician, after graduating in 1965, later founding Medical Informatics Section of the Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics (in 1978) and become full professor of Charles university (in 1999) and Doctor of Sciences at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (in 1999) (7).

This organized Memorial Conference in Prague, dedicated to acknowledging and honoring to Jana Zvarova was possibility express some stories about Jana’s personality as teacher, academic, expert, woman, wife, mother – having “raised very successful children and being a role model for women in the field of Health informatics internationally”, as Jan H. van Bemmel, Marion Ball and Arie Hasman mentioned in their Obituary which published in IMIA newsletter from July 2017 (6).