Short Link: http://ehr.bz/pskr (from Process Support and Knowledge Representation)
As you can tell from this blog’s title (EHR Workflow Management Systems) and my Twitter account (), I think health IT and workflow technology is a great match. Many EHR (and related HIT) weaknesses are mirrored by business process management (BPM and related tech) strengths (for example, see Figure 3).
Therefore I was excited to see this tweet from :
Proceedings Process Support and Knowledge Representation in Healthcare:
— Manfred Reichert ()
The following (my emphasis) describes the contents of this proceedings of a workshop attended by both medical informatics and business process management researchers.
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.
The ProHealth’12 / KR4HC’12 workshop brought 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. In turn, 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. 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.
Using the published Table of Contents I tracked down preprints for most of the papers. Keep in mind they were likely edited and polished after the workshop. Nonetheless, they show important connections between healthcare information and healthcare processes. And they show the motivation of respective academic communities to understand and exploit these connections.
I hope these papers, and their authors, inspire US EHR, health IT and business process management professionals, organizations, and vendors to benefit from similar concerted effort.
Table of Contents Plus Links to Papers
Where I know of a Twitter account for an author (or relevant associated vendor or organization) I added it.
- The Elicitation, Representation, Application, and Automated Discovery of Time-Oriented Declarative Clinical Knowledge [could not find]
- Guidelines and Summarization [Could not find.]
- How Can Personal Context Improve Adherence to Clinical Guidelines?
- Rule-Based Combination of Comorbid Treatments for Chronic Diseases Applied to Hypertension, Diabetes Mellitus and Heart Failure [Could not find.]
- Knowledge-Driven Adaptive Execution of Care Pathways Based on Continuous Planning Techniques Twitter:
- Towards a Realistic Clinical-Guidelines Application Framework: Desiderata, Applications, and Lessons Learned.- Archetypes and Cooperation [Could not find.]
- Data Integration for Clinical Decision Support Based on openEHR Archetypes and HL7 Virtual Medical Record [Requires registration.] Slides Twitter:
- Semantic Integration of Patient Data and Quality Indicators Based on openEHR Archetypes Twitter:
- A Study of Semantic Proximity between Archetype Terms Based on SNOMED CT Relationships Twitter:
- Distributed Ad Hoc Cooperation in Healthcare [Could not find.]
- Process Mining and Temporal Analysis.- Embedding Conformance Checking in a Process Intelligence System in Hospital Environments
- Process Mining in Healthcare: Data Challenges When Answering Frequently Posed Questions Twitter:
- Flexible and Efficient Retrieval of Haemodialysis Time Series Twitter:
- An Approach for Representing and Managing Medical Exceptions in Care Pathways Based on Temporal Hierarchical Planning Techniques. Twitter:
Let me know if you track down any of the missing papers or know the Twitter accounts of additional authors.