CfP: KR4HC’13 / ProHealth’13 (in conjunction with AIME'13) Deadline: 8 March 2013

Call for Papers
5th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KR4HC'13)

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6th International Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

 

Organized as One Full Day Workshop

Acronym: KR4HC’13 / ProHealth’13

Murcia, Spain –  June 1st, 2013
In conjunction with the 14th Conference on 
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'13)
 
Web site: http://banzai-deim.urv.net/events/KR4HC-ProHealth-2013/


Important Dates
Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 8 March 2013

Notification of Acceptance: 9 April 2013

Camera-ready version: 7 May 2013

KR4HC/ProHealth Workshop: 1 June 2013



Workshop Goals

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients at affordable costs. These challenges become more prominent with the growth in the aging population with chronic diseases and the rise of healthcare costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, huge amounts of medical knowledge and patient data to be consulted in order to provide evidence-based recommendations, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates computer-based support of healthcare process & knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making.

This workshop brings together researchers from two communities who have been addressing these challenges from two different perspectives. The knowledge-representation for healthcare community, which is part of the larger medical informatics community, has been focusing on knowledge representation and reasoning to support knowledge management and clinical decision-making. This community has been developing efficient representations, technologies, and tools for integrating all the important elements that health care providers work with: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and healthcare information systems, clinical practice guidelines, and standardized medical vocabularies. The process-oriented information systems in healthcare community, which is part of the larger business process management (BPM) community, has been studying ways to adopt BPM technology in order to provide effective solutions for healthcare process management. BPM technology has been successfully used in other sectors for establishing process-aware enterprise information systems (vs. collections of stand-alone systems for different departments in the organization). Adopting BPM technology in the healthcare sector is starting to address some of the unique characteristics of healthcare processes, including their high degree of flexibility, the integration with EMRs and shared semantics of healthcare domain concepts, and the need for tight cooperation and communication among medical care teams.

This joint workshop brings together two approaches: healthcare process support, as addressed in previous ProHealth workshops, and healthcare knowledge representation as dealt with in previous KR4HC workshops. The workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of the two approaches for supporting healthcare process & healthcare knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized knowledge-based clinical process support can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from these different, yet similar fields to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes yet to be closed. This forum also provides an opportunity to explore how the approaches from the two communities could be better integrated.

History of the Joint Workshop 

Providing computer-based support in healthcare is a topic that has been picking up speed for more than two decades. We are witnessing a plethora of different workshops devoted to various topics involving computer applications for healthcare. Our goal has been to try to join forces with other communities in order to learn from each other, advance science, and create a stronger and larger community. In 2012, the two workshops, KR4HC and ProHealth held a joint workshop, which proved to be very successful. This year, we are aiming to continue the collaboration initiative and hold another joint workshop. 

The two workshops have quite a long history, as briefly described below.

The first KR4HC workshop, held in conjunction with the 12th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine conference (AIME'09), brought together members of two existing communities: the clinical guidelines and protocols community, who held a line of four workshops (European Workshop on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols (CPG'2000, CPG'2004); AI Techniques in Health Care: Evidence-based Guidelines and Protocols 2006; Computer-based Clinical Guidelines and Protocols 2008) and a related community who held a series of three workshops / special tracks devoted to the formalization, organization, and deployment of procedural knowledge in healthcare (CBMS’07 Special Track on Machine Learning and Management of Health Care Procedural Knowledge 2007; From Medical Knowledge to Global Health Care 2007; Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures 2008). Since then, two more KR4HC workshops have been held, in conjunction with the ECAI’10 and the AIME’11 conferences.

The first ProHealth workshop took place in the context of the 5th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in 2007. The next three ProHealth Workshops were also held in conjunction with BPM conferences (BPM'08, BPM’09, and BPM’11). The aim of ProHealth has been to bring together researchers from the BPM and the Medical Informatics communities. As the workshop was associated with the BPM conference that had never been attended by researchers from the Medical Informatics community, we had included Medical Informatics researchers as keynote speakers of the workshop, members of the program committee, and to our delight, saw a number of researchers from the Medical Informatics community actively participating in ProHealth workshops. Following the keynote talk given by Manfred Reichert from the BPM community at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2011 (AIME’11) conference, where KR4HC was held, the organizers of ProHealth and KR4HC workshops have shown their interest to hold their workshops in conjunction as part of the BPM'12 conference, which marks a landmark in the collaboration between the two communities. We are continuing the efforts that started four years ago by members of the Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC) community to strengthen the collaboration between the ProHealth and SEHC communities. 

Workshop Theme

Original contributions are sought, regarding the development of theory, techniques, and use cases of Artificial Intelligence and / or process management in the area of healthcare, particularly connected to patient data, clinical guidelines and healthcare processes.

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 the goals of the workshop. The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to the following areas:

•    Process modeling in healthcare
•    Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines / protocols and decision support
•    Workflow management in healthcare
•    Semantic integration of healthcare processes with electronic medical records 
•    Knowledge representation and ontologies for healthcare processes
•    Temporal knowledge representations and exploitation
•    Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes
•    Visualization, monitoring and mining healthcare processes
•    Knowledge extraction from healthcare databases and EPRs
•    Knowledge combination, personalization and adaptation of healthcare processes
•    Compliance of healthcare processes
•    Evaluation of quality and safety of careflow systems
•    Managing flexibility and exceptions in healthcare processes
•    Process optimization and simulation in healthcare organizations and healthcare networks
•    Experiences in deploying knowledge-based tools in healthcare
•    Patient empowerment in healthcare 
•    Linking clinical care and clinical research
•    Lifecycle management for healthcare processes
•    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

Format of the Workshop

The 1-day workshop will comprise accepted long and short papers, tool presentations, and 1 keynote. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. An informal proceedings will be available during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper. The selected best long (full) papers will be included in the formal proceedings, which are expected to be published as part of the LNAI Springer series, as it was done in all previous editions of the workshop.
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 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 LNCS  format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper, position paper, or tool report). Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the Easychair system 
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr4hcprohealth2013.