IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

About IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

Overview

The IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (abbreviated J-BHI or IEEE J. Biomed. Health Inform.) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It sits at the intersection of information and communication technologies with health, healthcare, the life sciences, and biomedicine — publishing original research on how computing, data science, sensors, and communications technology advance medicine and public health.

J-BHI is sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) as the lead society, together with the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society. It is one of the leading journals in computer science and information systems with a strong interdisciplinary focus and a biomedical and health application emphasis. The journal's official website is maintained at jbhi.embs.org, and all published articles, along with accepted papers awaiting print, are available electronically through IEEE Xplore.

J-BHI is a hybrid journal: it publishes both traditional subscription-based articles and open access (OA) articles for which authors pay a fee. The quality of the peer-review process is identical for both tracks. Papers published in J-BHI are typically organized under section headings of Bioinformatics, Imaging Informatics, Sensor Informatics, Medical Informatics, and Public Health Informatics, complemented by managed special issues and special sections on topics of strategic importance, coordinated by guest editors who are leading experts in those fields.

The journal explicitly encourages large-cohort studies with clearly demonstrated clinical translational value, especially when supplemented by online datasets or algorithms that can be shared by the research community. It serves researchers, engineers, clinicians, and health-system decision-makers working across academia, industry, and government.

History

J-BHI's lineage dates to 1997, when IEEE launched the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (T-ITB), led by the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and shared with other IEEE societies. T-ITB published through 2012, building a reputation as a premier venue for biomedical information technology research.

In 2013, the journal was retitled as the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, reflecting the broadening of the field from "information technology in biomedicine" to the wider, more contemporary landscape of biomedical and health informatics. Volume numbering continued seamlessly from T-ITB (J-BHI's 2013 volume was volume 17), underscoring that it is a continuation of the same journal rather than a new title.

Since the retitling, the journal has grown into one of the highest-impact journals in the informatics field. Its scope has progressively expanded to cover the explosion of health big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning in medicine, wearable and sensor systems, medical imaging informatics, and digital health — while retaining the engineering rigor of its IEEE heritage. Early J-BHI volumes already included widely influential survey papers, such as the 2013 survey of ambient-assisted living tools for older adults, and the journal later became a principal venue for the deep-learning-in-healthcare literature wave of the mid-2010s.

The journal has also evolved its internal organization over time: issues are organized into topical sections, and a steady program of special issues — covering topics such as telehealth systems, generative AI for healthcare, wireless medical systems, and weakly supervised learning for medical data — is managed by invited guest editors. In 2026, under new editorial leadership, the journal began restructuring into a formal set of sections (starting with Clinical Informatics and Bioinformatics), each with its own section editors and editorial boards, to make the journal more clinical in nature and more responsive to emerging areas such as AI governance, ontologies and knowledge graphs, and data provenance.

Scope

According to the journal's official statement of scope, J-BHI publishes original papers describing recent advances in biomedical and health informatics where information and communication technologies intersect with health, healthcare, life sciences, and biomedicine. Papers must contain original content in theoretical analysis, methods, technical development, and/or novel clinical applications of information systems.

Topics covered by J-BHI include, but are not limited to:

• Acquisition, transmission, storage, retrieval, management, processing, and analysis of biomedical and health information.
• Applications of information and communication technologies in the practice of healthcare, public health, patient monitoring, preventive care, early diagnosis of diseases, discovery of new therapies, and patient-specific treatment protocols leading to improved outcomes.
• Integration of electronic medical and health records, methods of longitudinal data analysis, data mining, and knowledge discovery tools.
• Clinical information systems, decision support systems, medical and biological imaging informatics, wearable systems, and body area/sensor networks.
• Informatics in biological and physiological systems; personalized and pervasive health technologies (telemedicine, u-, p-, m-, and e-health) for public health, home healthcare, and wellness management.
• Integration topics such as interoperability, protocol-based patient care, evidence-based medicine, and methods of securing patient data.

Under the current editorial direction (2026), the journal places particular emphasis on clinical outcomes: articles that demonstrate clear clinical relevance and translational value are prioritized, and the scope is being broadened to include more clinical informatics, public health informatics, and learning health systems. The journal also highlights the infrastructure needed for trustworthy AI in healthcare — large amounts of clean, well-indexed authoritative data, ontologies that yield knowledge graphs and support new methods of reasoning, and embedded AI governance and data provenance.

Manuscripts are normally submitted as regular papers, review papers, or special-issue papers. Note that communications articles are no longer published in J-BHI. For review papers, authors must first contact the Editor-in-Chief with a review-paper proposal, which is discussed case by case with the Editorial Office before submission.

Editorial leadership

The current Editor-in-Chief is Dr. Peter L. Elkin, as listed on the journal's official IEEE EMBS website. Dr. Elkin is a University at Buffalo (UB) Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo. His appointment was announced in early 2026.

Dr. Elkin has worked in biomedical informatics since 1981 and has been actively researching health big data science since 1987. He received his Bachelor of Science from Union College and his M.D. from New York Medical College, followed by an NIH/NLM-sponsored fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. He received the Mayo Department of Medicine's Laureate Award (2005) and is the inaugural recipient of the Homer R. Warner Award for outstanding contribution to the field of medical informatics. He publishes the Springer series Textbook on Ontology, Terminology and Terminological Systems, and his expertise spans knowledge representation, ontology, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and health IT standards. He was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association for clinical informatics excellence and to the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.

His stated editorial agenda is to make the journal more clinical in nature — expanding coverage of clinical informatics, public health informatics, and learning health systems, and focusing more on articles with clear clinical outcomes — while positioning the journal as a thought leader on the safe and effective use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, supported by strong evidence and trials.

The immediate predecessor as Editor-in-Chief was Dimitrios I. Fotiadis, who served following the EMBS search for a term beginning January 2023. The Editor-in-Chief position is a three-year term, renewable for an additional three years.

Editorially, the journal operates a rigorous process: the Editor-in-Chief and the Associate Editor in charge first perform a submission-conformance review, evaluating novelty, quality, and fit with scope, and may return a manuscript without external review if it does not meet the journal's standards. Manuscripts that pass screening are sent out for peer review.

Publication details

Metrics

The journal's official IEEE EMBS pages do not publish an impact factor, acceptance rate, or other citation metrics. The figures below come from third-party journal trackers and are clearly attributed; they are not official IEEE figures and should be verified against the current Journal Citation Reports and Scopus before being cited formally.

• Impact factor: not officially published by IEEE. Third-party tracker journalsearches.com (last crawled October 2026) reports an impact factor of 7.7, attributed to the June 2026 Journal Citation Reports release. An alternative tracker (citefactor.org) lists impact factors of 6.8 (2024–25), 6.7 (2023), and 7.7 (2022). These trackers are not official sources.
• Scopus CiteScore: not officially published by IEEE; third-party trackers report 14.3 with Scopus coverage from 2013 onward.
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): third-party sources report approximately 1.624, with Q1 rankings across its categories: Biotechnology, Computer Science Applications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Health Informatics, and Health Information Management.
• H-index: third-party trackers report approximately 179 (not an official IEEE figure).
• Acceptance rate: not officially published — unavailable.
• Article processing charge (open access): the journal's official Information for Authors document sets the discounted OA fee at $2,195 for accepted manuscripts when the author chooses the open access track; traditional (subscription) submissions incur no OA payment. Corresponding authors from low-income countries are eligible for waived or reduced OA APCs.
• Page charges: review papers are nominally 10 pages and regular papers 8 pages. For papers of 8 pages or fewer, only voluntary page charges apply ($110/page); pages 9–10 incur mandatory charges of $250/page; pages 11 and beyond incur $350/page. Mandatory charges are billed to the author(s) or their institution.

Landmark papers

The following influential papers, all published in this journal (or under its current title), have verified DOIs. Together they trace the journal's arc from its early years to the deep-learning era:

• Shickel, B., Tighe, P. J., Bihorac, A., & Rashidi, P. (2018). "Deep EHR: A Survey of Recent Advances in Deep Learning Techniques for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Analysis." IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 22(5), 1589–1604. DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2017.2767063 — a widely cited survey of deep learning applied to electronic health records (freely available via PubMed Central: PMCID PMC6043423).
• Ravi, D., Wong, C., Deligianni, F., Berthelot, M., Andreu-Perez, J., Lo, B., & Yang, G.-Z. (2017). "Deep Learning for Health Informatics." IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 21(1), 4–21. DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2016.2636665 — an early, influential review that mapped deep-learning techniques onto health informatics problems.
• Rashidi, P., & Mihailidis, A. (2013). "A Survey on Ambient-Assisted Living Tools for Older Adults." IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 17(3), 579–590. DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2012.2234129 — a foundational survey published in the journal's first year under its new title, shaping the assisted-living and smart-home health literature.
• Valenza, G., et al. (2014). "Wearable Monitoring for Mood Recognition in Bipolar Disorder Based on History-Dependent Long-Term Heart Rate Variability Analysis." IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 18(5), 1625–1635. DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2013.2290382 — an early landmark in affective computing and wearable physiological monitoring for mental health.

How to publish: submission information

Where to submit: All manuscripts must be submitted electronically through the journal's ScholarOne Manuscript Central site at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jbhiembs. Do not send submissions or revisions directly to the Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editors. For technical assistance, authors can contact the ScholarOne Support Desk (oprssupport@ieee.org).

Paper types: Manuscripts are normally submitted as regular papers, review papers, or special-issue papers. Communications articles are no longer published. Review-paper proposals must be sent to the Editor-in-Chief before submission and are assessed case by case. A regular paper accepted or rejected under its category cannot be re-categorized into a special issue after submission.

Formatting: Submissions must be in IEEE single-spaced, double-column format with embedded figures and tables, converted to PDF for upload (Manuscript Central can convert MS Word files, but authors should proofread the conversion). The nominal final-format lengths are 10 pages for review papers and 8 pages for regular papers; authors must also upload the author consent form, a cover letter, and supporting supplementary files.

Peer review: The journal uses single-blind peer review (reviewers know the authors' identities; authors do not know the reviewers'). Each regular or special-issue paper is reviewed by a minimum of three independent reviewers, and each review paper by a minimum of five. Articles are screened for plagiarism during the submission stage and again before acceptance, and IEEE applies sanctions against plagiarism and duplicate submission. Possible decisions are: accept, accept pending minor revision, reject/resubmit (major revision with new external review), or reject. Importantly, only one round of major revision is permitted — if a revised paper again receives a major-revision recommendation, it is rejected automatically.

Requirements for authors: All authors must have a registered ORCID to submit or review proofs. Authors must sign and submit a completed IEEE Copyright Form electronically after acceptance (IEEE owns the copyright to its published technical contributions, while returning full reuse rights to authors and employers). For studies involving human subjects, relevant institutional review board (IRB) approval must be obtained, and the paper must state the IRB approval reference number explicitly; data from public databases must cite the original source. Manuscripts must be previously unpublished and not under consideration anywhere else.

Costs: Traditional (subscription) submission requires no OA payment. Authors choosing open access pay the discounted OA fee of $2,195 upon acceptance; overlength page charges and color charges are billed separately. Mandatory page charges ($250/page for pages 9–10, $350/page beyond page 10) apply to all accepted papers and are not negotiable; the publisher may withhold publication of current or future submissions if these charges are not honored. Corresponding authors from low-income countries are eligible for waived or reduced OA APCs.

Data sharing: The journal encourages authors to share datasets and algorithms online, and IEEE supports open data through IEEE DataPort (which accepts open-access datasets up to 2 TB, each assigned a DOI). Authors of NIH-funded work may submit funded work to PubMed Central in the 12th month of print publication, in line with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Frequently asked questions

What was the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics called before? It was the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (T-ITB), published from 1997 through 2012. The journal was retitled in 2013; volume numbering continued without interruption.

Who is the current Editor-in-Chief? Dr. Peter L. Elkin, University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor and Chair of Biomedical Informatics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, appointed in 2026. He succeeded Dimitrios I. Fotiadis.

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 2168-2194; online/electronic ISSN 2168-2208 (CODEN IJBHA9).

Is the journal open access? It is a hybrid journal. Authors may choose traditional subscription publication (free of OA charges) or pay the official open access fee ($2,195) for unrestricted public access.

Is the journal indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE? Journal listings report indexing in PubMed and MEDLINE as well as Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, and Embase; articles appear on PubMed with PMIDs and are deposited in PubMed Central.

What is the journal's impact factor? IEEE does not publish an impact factor on the journal's official pages. Third-party trackers attribute a 2026 Journal Citation Reports impact factor of approximately 7.7 to the journal; this is not an official figure and should be verified in the current JCR.

How long does peer review take? IEEE does not officially publish average review or submission-to-publication times for J-BHI. The journal aims to minimize the time from submission to publication and allows authors to check review status online in Manuscript Central.

How many reviewers see my paper? A minimum of three independent reviewers for regular and special-issue papers, and five for review papers, under single-blind review.

Can I submit a review paper directly? No — you must first contact the Editor-in-Chief with a review-paper proposal, which is discussed case by case before submission.

Where do I submit? Exclusively through ScholarOne Manuscript Central at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jbhiembs. Submissions sent directly to the Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editors are not accepted.