The Inauguration Meeting of the EMBS International Conference on BHI Meets in China: Global Grand Challenge on Health Informatics

On 5–7 January, more than 420 world leaders and attendees representing approximately 40 countries/regions from academia, industry, and government gathered for the inauguration meeting of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) in the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, Shenzhen, China. Health informatics has been listed by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering as one of the 14 grand challenges for engineering of the 21st century, and BHI is a new special topic conference recently launched by the EMBS in this area. The conference, BHI, is named in conjunction with an EMBS flagship transaction, of which the title will soon be changed from IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine to IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, beginning in 2013.