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.