FHIES 2012 - International Symposium on Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems - FHIES 2012

Important Dates
? Abstract submission: May 6, 2012
? Paper submission: May 13, 2012
? Notification of acceptance: June 24, 2012
? Submission of final version for the pre-proceedings: July 30, 2012
? Submission of final version for the post-proceedings (LNCS): October 1, 2012
Background
Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly enabling role in addressing the global challenges of healthcare, in both the developed and the developing world. The use of software in medical devices has caused growing concerns in relation to safety and efficacy. The increasing adoption of health information systems provides great potential benefits but also poses severe risks, both with respect to security and privacy and in regard to patient safety. Hospital and other information systems raise important issues of workflow support and interoperability. Regulators, manufacturers and clinical users have pointed out the need to research sound and science-based engineering methods that facilitate the development and certification of quality ICT systems in health care. Such methods may draw from or combine techniques from various disciplines, including but not limited to software engineering, electronic engineering, computing science, information science, mathematics, and industrial engineering.
Aims
The purpose of the symposium series on Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems (FHIES) is to promote a nascent research area that aims to develop and apply theories and methods from a variety of disciplines, including software engineering, computer engineering, computing science, information science, mathematics, and industrial engineering for the purpose of modeling, building and certifying software-intensive ICT systems in healthcare. Moreover, since humans often play a pivotal rule in the process of using such systems, theories from the human factors engineering community may have to be integrated with methods from the technology-oriented domains in order to create effective engineering methodologies for socio-technical systems in the healthcare domain.
Research on theories, techniques and tools of software systems modeling, verification and validation has been an important area of computer science and software engineering, known as Formal Methods. This research addresses the challenging problem of design and certification of safety or mission critical software systems through abstraction and decomposition techniques based on the use of mathematical modeling theories and sound engineering methods.
Formal methods have primarily addressed the correctness of systems used in the industrial, financial, and defense applications. However, they have recently found application in modeling and analysis of complex systems that involve interacting behaviour of many kinds of objects and agents, including software systems, physical objects and humans. The models of these systems have both discrete and continuous behaviour, and both qualitative and quantitative (e.g., spatial timing and probabilistic) properties. It is believed that these methods can be adapted for modelling problems of health informatics, given that important challenges can be addressed, e.g., the aspects related to scalability. A major objective of FHIES is to advance research and application of formal methods in the context of health care software systems. Another objective of FHIES is to explicitly include a focus on health care ICT applications in the developing world (in addition to systems used in the developed countries), since unique engineering challenges arise in both settings.
Scope
In order to attain these objectives, FHIES seeks contributions from both the solution domain (methods communities) and the problem domain (health care and health informatics). Solution-domain papers should present their methods in the context of a concrete application in health care, while problem-domain papers should be devised to educate the methods community about unique challenges and characteristics of the health care domain. Consequently, the scope of FHIES is not limited to formal methods papers in the classical sense. However, all submissions should seek to inform and further the development, adaptation, evaluation and adoption of formally based and rigorous engineering methods in health care systems. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Research on how computational models, techniques and tools of analysis and verification (including modeling notations, semantics, logics, techniques of model checking, runtime monitoring, and simulation) can be applied to problems of health informatics, e.g.,
modelling and monitoring health organisations
models of workflow and resource management in hospitals
quality assurance programs for software systems in hospitals
privacy and security of data in the context of interoperable systems and multiple jurisdictions
interoperability of health information systems
complex policy management and monitoring, and risks and disaster management
Modelling, design and verification techniques and innovative practices of software-based ICT and software-intensive medical devices, including, but not limited to
improving regulatory regimes for guaranteeing the safety and efficacy of medical devices (the problem of certification)
software development methodologies in the medical device industry
solving issues raised by the interoperation of medical devices with each other and with health information systems
integrated (multi-institutional) health information systems, healthcare process and workflow modelling and monitoring
model-driven, service oriented, agent and ontology based approaches, of health information systems
component-based technologies for modelling and designing verifiable integrated health information systems
monitoring of operational scenarios in a clinical environment (consisting of medical devices, patients and healthcare professionals), and monitoring of networked devices
pervasive and mobile computing platforms for health information systems
medical cyber-physical systems and medical sensor networks
Application and integration of foundational methods from different disciplines in engineering and science to health informatics.
Foundational research on characterizing and formalizing specific engineering challenges of ICT-based health service delivery in different settings, including developed countries as well as the developing world.
We solicit high quality submissions reporting on
original research contributions (16 pages maximum)
application experience, case studies and software prototypes (16 pages max.)
surveys, comparisons, and state-of-the-art reports (16 pages max.)
position papers that define research projects with identified challenges and milestones (8 pages max.)
In all cases, page limits are measured in LNCS format. Submissions will be judged on the basis of originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and relevance to the conference. Submissions should be in English, prepared in the LNCS format (see here for details). Papers should be submitted at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fhies20....
Submission constitutes a commitment to publish the paper in the conference proceedings with Springer LNCS and to attend the symposium and present the paper, if accepted.
All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted are planned to be published by Springer Verlag (LNCS). Like in the previous year, we plan to publish a pre-proceeding prior to the symposium and the LNCS post-proceeding after the symposium. This gives authors the opportunity to incorporate the feedback received at our interactive symposium. Please note: all authors accepted for the pre-proceedings will also be published in the post-proceedings. Moreover, authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers for journal publication within a special issue on FHIES.