Introduction to the First International
Workshop on Process-Oriented Information
Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’07)
Manfred Reichert1,MorPeleg
2,andRichardLenz
3
1Information Systems Group, University of Twente, The Netherlands
2Department of Management Information Systems, University of Haifa, Israel
3Database Group, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
[email protected]en.de
1 Workshop Background and Goals
Healthcare organizations and healthcare providers are facing the challenge of
delivering high-quality services to their patients at affordable costs. High degree
of specialization, prolonged medical care for the aging population, increasing
costs for dealing with chronic diseases, and the need for personalized healthcare
are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situ-
ation necessitates a change in the way healthcare is delivered to the patients
and healthcare processes are managed. Business Process Management (BPM)
technology provides a key to implement these changes. Though patient-centered
process support has become increasingly important in healthcare, BPM technol-
ogy has not yet been broadly used in healthcare environments.
The ProHealth’07 workshop is held in Brisbane in conjunction with the Fifth
International Conference on Business Process Management. ProHealth’07 elabo-
rates both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare processes.
It further provides a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized
process support in healthcare can be debated. In particular, ProHealth’07 brings
together researchers and practitioners from different communities (e.g., BPM, In-
formation Systems, Medical Informatics, E-Health) who share an interest in both
healthcare process support and advanced BPM technologies. The workshop deals
with different facets of process-orientedhealthcare information systems, and gives
insights into the social and technological challenges, applications, and perspec-
tives emerging for BPM in this context.
2 Workshop Description
In healthcare, process-oriented information systems have been demanded for
more than 20 years and terms like continuity of care have even been discussed
for more than 50 years. Yet, healthcare organizations are still characterized by an
A. ter Hofstede, B. Benatallah, and H.-Y. Paik (Eds.): BPM 2007 Workshops, LNCS 4928, pp. 314–315, 2008.
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Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
Introduction to the First International Workshop 315
increasing number of medical disciplines and specialized departments that fre-
quently only focus on their internal processes; i.e., optimization and automation
of healthcare process often stops at the border of healthcare departments.
The patient treatment process, however, requires interdisciplinary coopera-
tion and coordination. The upcoming trend towards healthcare networks and
integrated care further increases the need to effectively support interdisciplinary
cooperation along with the patient treatment process. Recent studies discussing
the preventability of adverse events in medicine recommend the use of infor-
mation 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.
The ProHealth’07 workshop focuses on research which aims at closing this gap.
It elaborates both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare
processes and discusses approaches existing in this context. Addressed topics
include the modelling of healthcare processes, process-oriented system architec-
tures in healthcare, workflow management in healthcare, IT support for guide-
line implementation and medical decision support, flexibility and exception han-
dling in healthcare processes, requirements for medical guideline and medical
pathway support, process optimization in healthcare organizations and health-
care networks, process interoperability in healthcare and healthcare standards,
healthcare process patterns, secure healthcare processes, lifecycle management
for healthcare processes, and healthcare process coordination.
3 Paper Selection Process
Submitted papers were evaluated on the basis of relevance, originality, technical
quality, and exposition. Papers had to clearly establish their research contribu-
tion as well as their relation to healthcare processes. We accepted six papers
as full paper and one as short paper (out of fourteen submissions). The seven
presentations are complemented by two keynotes. We thank Samson W. Tu
(Stanford University, School of Medicine) as well as Robert Dunlop (InferMed
Ltd, London, UK) and John Fox (University of Oxford) for taking over this role.
We would like to thank the members of the program committee and the
reviewers for their efforts in selecting the papers (in alphabetical order): W.M.P.
van der Aalst, E. Ammenwerth, O. Bott, P. de Clercq, E. Coeira, J. Fox, Y.
Han, S. Jablonski, K. Kuhn, R. Lenz (Co-chair), O. Marjanovic, S. Miksch, B.
Mutschler, M. Peleg (Co-chair), S. Quaglini, S. Sadiq, M. Reichert (Co-chair),
H. Reijers, H. Schuldt, Y. Shahar, T. Spil, A. ten Teije, P. Terenziani, S. Tu,
D.Wang,B.WeberandM.Weske.Theyhelpedustocompileahigh-quality
program for the ProHealth’07 workshop. We would also like to acknowledge the
splendid support of the local organization and the BPM’07 workshop chairs.
We hope you will find the papers of the ProHealth’07 workshop interesting
and stimulating.
