4th International Workshop on

Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare
Clermont-Ferrand, France – August 29th 2011

In conjunction with the 9th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM’11)

Web Site: http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/prohealth-11


Workshop Goals
Healthcare organizations and providers are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients at affordable costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, prolonged medical care for the aging population, increased costs for dealing with chronic diseases, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates a change in the way healthcare is delivered to the patients and healthcare processes are managed.

BPM technology provides a key to implement these changes. Though patient-centered process support becomes increasingly crucial in healthcare, BPM technology has not yet been broadly used in healthcare environments. This workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare processes. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized process support in healthcare can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from dif¬ferent communities (e.g., BPM, Information Systems, Medical Informatics, E-Health) who share an interest in both healthcare processes and BPM technologies.

The great success of the first three ProHealth Workshops, which were held in conjunction with the 5th, 6th and 7th International Conferences on Business Process Management (BPM’07 and BPM'08, and BPM09), demonstrated the potential of such an interdisciplinary forum to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes that are yet to be closed.



Workshop Theme
Enterprise-wide process-oriented information systems have been demanded by healthcare institutions for over 20 years and terms like “continuity of care” have even been discussed for over 50 years. Yet, healthcare organizations are currently using a plethora of specialized non-standard information systems and continue to focus on development of systems for specialized departments that frequently only focus on their in¬ternal processes. Many of the successful existing healthcare information systems are not process-oriented, but focus on specific functions like imaging, drug order-entry, laboratory test result storage, storage of diagnoses and progress notes in electronic medical records, alerts and reminders, and billing.
Information systems and decision-support systems for managing patient care processes, however, are still scarcely developed; and the latter is most often accomplished by only a small number of university-led teams. Such patient care management systems are highly com-plex and pose many challenges: they require availability of encoded data coming from different sources, flexibility in deviating from the encoded process at the discretion of the physician user, and may involve a team of clinical users that together take care of a patient in a coordinated way.
The recent trend towards healthcare networks and inte¬grated care even increases the need to effec¬tively support interdisciplinary cooper¬ation along with the patient treatment process. Recent studies discussing the preven¬tability of adverse events in medicine recommend the use of information technology, since insufficient communication and missing information turned out to be among the major factors contributing to adverse events. Yet, there is still a discrepancy between the potential and the actual usage of IT in healthcare.
This workshop focuses on research projects which aim at closing this gap. It shall ela¬borate both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare processes, and discuss approaches existing in this context.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

Process modelling in healthcare
Workflow management in healthcare
IT support for guideline implementation and decision support
Visualization, monitoring and mining of healthcare processes
Managing flexibility and exceptions in healthcare processes
Process optimization in healthcare organizations and healthcare networks
Process patterns in healthcare
Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes
Compliance of healthcare processes
Lifecycle management for healthcare processes
Integrating healthcare processes with electronic medical records
Context-aware healthcare processes
Ambient intelligence & smart processes in healthcare
Mobile process support in healthcare
Process interoperability & standards in healthcare
Process-oriented system architectures in healthcare

Submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to healthcare processes.


Format of the Workshop
The 1-day workshop will comprise accepted papers, tool presentations, and a keynote. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. All accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings published
by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series. There will be a single LNBIP volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM workshops. As this volume will appear after the conference, there will be informal proceedings during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper.


Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Three types of submissions are possible: (1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results, (2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage that has not yet been evaluated, and (3) tool reports. Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Papers should be submitted in the LNBIP format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indica-tion of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report).
Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the Easychair system. The corresponding link will be published within the next days!

Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the EasyChair System.To do so, please open an EasyChair account and submit a paper by going to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=prohealth11 (using the role of an author).


Intended Audience
The ProHealth’11 workshop will deal with different facets of process-oriented information systems in healthcare and it will give insights into the technological challenges, applications, and perspectives emerging for BPM technology in this context. With varied contents, we hope to present a lively and inspiring program for participants from academia, industry, and healthcare organizations.


Important Dates
Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 16 May 2011
Notification of Acceptance: 10 June 2011
Camera-ready version: 30 June 2011
ProHealth Workshop: 29 August 2011