ProHealth’11 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