IHS 2011 - The 1st International Workshop on Interoperable Healthcare Systems (IHS’2011)

The 1st International Workshop on Interoperable Healthcare Systems (IHS’2011) - Challenges, Technologies, and Trends

Description
According to a 2009 report published by the World Health Organization, "Globally in 2006, expenditure on health was about 8.7% of gross domestic product, with the highest level in the Americas at 12.8\% and the lowest in the South-East Asia Region at 3.4%. This translates to about US$716 per capita on the average but there is tremendous variation ranging from a very low US$31 per capita in the South-East Asia Region to a high of US$2636 per capita in the Americas" (http:/www.who.int/whosis/whostat/EN\_WHS09\_Table7.pdf).
http://www.fedcsis.org/?q=node/48
Spending on healthcare systems worldwide continues to surge in spite of the limited number of funding bodies besides governments. These systems have to include state of the art technologies and equipments to keep up the pace with the demands of a growing population and address the risks that diseases put on the welfare of this population. The rapid widespread of some diseases and scarcity of appropriate medical facilities in some countries are examples of challenges that healthcare stakeholders face daily. In addition the lack of a common healthcare systems interoperability framework undermines regularly the efforts put into offering better services that spread over multiple stakeholders. These systems are simply not meant to collaborate making any cross-system scenario tedious and error prone.

Aims and topics
This workshop aims at gathering researchers from the fields of IT and healthcare to think about the obstacles that hurdle the leveraging of interoperable IT healthcare applications. We target researchers from both industry and academia to join forces in this new area. We intend to discuss the recent and significant developments in the general area of healthcare systems. In particular, we hope to identify techniques from IT like service and ubiquitous l computing that will have the greatest impact on making healthcare systems collaborate.

Specific possible topics include (but not limited to) :

Service computing for interoperable healthcare systems
Agent computing for interoperable healthcare systems
Pervasive computing for interoperable healthcare systems
Standards for interoperable healthcare systems
Methods for healthcare systems design
Semantic technologies for healthcare systems
Privacy and security in healthcare systems
Mobile healthcare systems
Context management for healthcare systems
Protection of individual privacy for aggregate anonymous data
Healthcare security and privacy policies
Artificial intelligence technologies to support complex decision making in healthcare systems
Case studies

Audience
This workshop will be of particular interest to IT researchers who are working in the field of healthcare systems, those interested in developing open systems, in tracking and developing standards, and of general interest to anyone using IT for interoperable software development. We also believe that the Workshop's topic area will be of significant interest to the wider IT community and expect industry participation.

Format
The format of the workshop in terms of number of sessions, types of papers (long or short), keynote speakers, and last but not least panel discussions will be set upon completing paper review and author notification. The workshop format will be designed to foster discussion and developing action outcomes on key issues relating to developing interoperable healthcare systems.

Timetable

Submission deadline : May 31, 2011
Review outcome notification : June 30, 2011
Final paper deadline : July 31, 2011
Workshop held : September 19-21, 2011