International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13) & Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Call for Papers

5^th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13)

+

6^th 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 1^st, 2013

In conjunction with the 14th Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'13)

Web site: ...

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 ...

My coat, Your coat, the Community cloakroom

'Untitled' 2012 (coats, wire, screws), by Jannis Kounellis

"Such wall-mounted three-dimensional pieces seem to me to talk the language of painting rather than sculpture. So does a massive, poignantly flopping black cross created from several navy coats tied together with wire and screws, hung against a wall. Each coat is a human measure, a stand-in for a human presence." p.20.

Wullschlager, J. (2012) Arts: Beauty in a burlap sack, Financial Times, 8-9 December. p. 20.




Bunzl, J. (2001) writes:

"Expressed in terms of a community-building process, we could thus identify the entity of the nation state as representing the equivalent of the individual person: the prime agent through which community or chaos in the world will ultimately be determined." p.20.

Additional link:
Parasol unit (Jannis Kounellis exhibition)

Bunzl, J. (2001) The Simultaneous Policy – An Insider’s Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet. New European Publications.
Image source:
Wullschlager, J. (2012) Arts: Beauty in a burlap sack, Financial Times, 8-9 December. p. 20.

Clusters of empathy

There still is a Complexity in Primary Care group but it is now essentially silent. I've met several people through the group over the years.

It might be decades since James Gleick's book Chaos (1987) and yet there is plenty of mileage left in complexity. One of the people I met through the group and hoped to meet in Australia at the ICN Congress is Paul Bennett who informed me of the following paper:

Academic Psychiatry, 33:6, Nov-Dec 2009 p.489

Winseman, J., Malik, A., Morison, J., Balkoski, V. (2009) Students’ Views on Factors Affecting Empathy in Medical Education. Academic Psychiatry. 33:484–491.

In explaining Hodges' model to Paul he was struck by the conceptual clustering in this paper. It isn't that there is a direct match between the paper's figure 2 and the care (knowledge) domains of the model, but multidimensional scaling is a potential tool to explore Hodges' model too.

The influence of political factors in medical education might be another aspect to consider. This is a dimension Hodges' model can encompass.

An acute concern at present in the NHS is the prospect of a seven day service, necessitating changes to the contracts of doctors and other disciplines.

Thanks to:
Paul Bennett, Primary Health Care Education Officer
Broken Hill University Department of Rural Health - Broken Hill
PO Box 457, BROKEN HILL NSW 2880
http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/drh/

Conferences and studies (what's the date?!)

I don't know about 21.12.12 being a date of note. 12.12.12 has brought another addition to a string of  disappointing conjunctions this past week.

I posted in the summer - here - about the ICN Congress in Melbourne next May. My submission did not make it, being placed on the reserve list. If this journey was going to happen then I would need to make arrangements now. So a desire to visit Australia and share Hodges' model with the ICN community and possibly some academic centers there will have to wait for another time. The original idea of a symposium would have been marvellous, so perhaps there are partnerships still to be forged.

Next up: another possible speaking opportunity for April, admittedly provisional has not been confirmed. Quite a disappointment this as I would have repeated a workshop approach I've used.

And finally ... finding an avenue to study Hodges' model at a postgraduate level (part time PhD) is proving far from straightforward. I knew this would be the case, so I will continue to refine my preparations and make further enquiries and applications.

As this year comes to a close I'm pleased to have done the presentations to date. Great experiences and communities all. I understand that the preoccupations with the Mayan calendar and the end of the World are mistaken. It is the start of a new calendar - a new age. That (always) sounds good to me.

H2CM: the 'title wall'

Museums and other organisations will often use a 'Title Wall' to present an exhibition. I read about this in the current IdN World and as I did thought about the Tate (London and Liverpool) and the visit to the National Gallery last February. The title wall will feature dedicated design, specific use of colour, typography and layout to communicate the promise that is the exhibition inside.

Perhaps Hodges' model is a Title Wall for health and social care?

Immediately, what title are we to use?

To begin with it is "Mrs Moore", until "Jessica - is fine."

The title wall is an invitation for a dialogue with an artist or artists. Hodges' model is an invitation to patient, carer, health professional and student to engage in a care dialogue.

The story still needs to be told whether by an artist or the patient. Listen to the wall. It should say nothing, despite the divide. Self. Other.

Words. Icons. Threaded in time. Often disjoint in mind.

What a job that combines the arts and the sciences - to collaborate in formulating THE BIG PICTURE of a person's health and social care situation.

A museum such as MOMA apparently has an in-house design team.

In-house ... this is our prize.

Can we provide the patient, carer and the general public with the level of health literacy for them to engage in self-care?

Care4grafitti anyone?

Image source: http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/tag/ann-temkin

Radical Statistics Group: Journal #107 Health & Wealth

Mis-measurement of health and wealth – Issue 107 (2012)

See also:

Straight Statistics

The UK Statistics Authority

The Willis Commission on Nursing Education: Recommendations

Here are the recommendations from this commission (the full report is also available):

• Patient centred care should be at the heart of all pre-registration nursing education and continuing professional development.
• There were no shortcomings found in nursing education that could be directly responsible for poor standards of care or a decline in care standards.
• Nurses and their organisations must stand up to be counted on the challenge of poor care and loss of public confidence in order to restore professional pride.
• Nursing education needs to imbed patient safety and dignity as a top priority.
• Better evaluation of and research into nursing education programmes is necessary to ensure a programme that is fit for purpose.
• The future nursing workforce requires nurses to work in a variety of settings.
• Recruitment campaigns need to widen their diversity in order to encourage the widest, best possible range of applicants.
• Health care service providers must fully support nursing education.
• Universities need to recognise nursing as a practice and research discipline.
• Attention needs to be paid to developing a strategic understanding of the nursing workforce as a whole and as a UK-wide resource.

See also: https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/shape-caring-review

My source: RCN and others

The Difference that Makes a Difference 2013 - Information: Space, Time, and Identity

You are invited to The Difference that Makes a Difference 2013, An interdisciplinary workshop on Information: Space, Time, and Identity.

Location: The Open University and the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes , UK
Dates: 8-10 April 2013
Website: http://www.dtmd.org.uk

Deadline for one page abstracts - 3rd January 2013.

Information has been conceptualised in many different ways in different disciplines, and the DTMD series of workshops is a forum for sharing of those insights . We are keen to involve as many different people, from as many different disciplines, as possible in presenting and participating in the workshop. We invite a wide range of participants to give short (10 minute) presentations on their work as it relates to an understanding of information.

There will be six sessions:

Over days 1 and 2 the first four sessions consist of a keynote speaker followed by six or seven short presentations (which will have been selected by referees from submitted abstracts) then a panel discussion.

1. Information and Space. The relationship between information and space, 'meaning' in our physical environment, and the information landscapes that go beyond physical space.
2. Information and Time. Both the historic framework of the notion of information, and time as a 'dimension' in information – physics, entropy, information and ‘the arrow of time’.
3. Information and Identity. Identity (race, gender, nationality, class and sexual orientation, for example) as information and, conversely, information as identity.
4. What is information? Why are so many disciplines using informational concepts in their narratives? Is a Universal Theory of Information (UTI) possible?

Sessions 5 and 6 on day 3 draw together the insights from the first two days in two ways. First, through art, when the results of the work of the Workshop artist’s collaboration with delegates is presented and discussed. Second, a final keynote speech from Luciano Floridi, Professor of the Philosophy of Information will lead in to a panel discussion with the keynote speakers from the earlier sessions.

For more details see the workshop programme: http://www.dtmd.org.uk/programme and the Call for Papers: ....

Accepted abstracts will be published in a Workshop Digest which will be made available online prior to the event, and, following the workshop, delegates will be invited to submit papers for special issue of Kybernetes, based on papers presented at the workshop.

We hope to see you in Milton Keynes in April.

Best wishes,

Magnus Ramage and David Chapman on behalf of the Programme Committee.

-- 
Dr. David A. Chapman CEng, FIET, FHEA
Senior Lecturer
Department of Communication and Systems
The Open University http://cands.open.ac.uk/
Intropy blog: http://www.intropy.co.uk/
... Twitter @dachapman

FatFonts - fonts with real weight: Giving space and data form

Links now appear broken ...

How it works (from fatfonts.org):

Fatfonts are designed so that the amount of dark pixels in a numeral character is proportional to the number it represents. For example, “2″ has twice the ink than “1″, “8″ has two times the amount of dark ink than “4″ etc. You can see this easily in the set of characters below:

Source for the above and animated: http://visual.ly/fatfonts-player?view=true

My source: Jacob Aron, Making numbers punch their weight, New Scientist, 5 May 2012, 214, 2863, p.12.

Bill Nighy Visits Malawi To See the Difference a Robin Hood Tax Could Make

Watch the video of Bill Nighy visiting Malawi to see how the decisions made by bankers are affecting the lives of ordinary people.

Additional link:
Health Protection Agency: HIV in the United Kingdom: 2012 Report