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.

BPM technology provides a key to implement these changes. Though patient-centered process support becomes increasingly crucial in healthcare, BPM technology has not yet been broadly used in healthcare environments. This workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare processes. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized process support in healthcare can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from different communities (e.g., BPM, Information Systems, Medical Informatics, E-Health) who share an interest in both healthcare processes and BPM technologies.

The first six ProHealth Workshops were held in conjunction with the 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th International Conferences on Business Process Management (BPM’07, BPM'08, BPM'09, BPM'2011, BPM'2012), and in conjunction with the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine conference (BPM'2013); the last two ProHealth workshops were unified with the Knowledge Representation for Healthcare workshop, in order to bring these communities of BPM and AI in medicine closer together. The great success of the past 6 workshops demonstrated the potential of such an interdisciplinary forum to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes that are yet to be closed.

Workshop Theme

Enterprise-wide process-oriented information systems have been demanded by healthcare institutions for over 20 years and terms like “continuity of care” have even been discussed for over 50 years. Yet, healthcare organizations are currently using a plethora of specialized non-standard information systems and continue to focus on development of systems for specialized departments that frequently only focus on their internal processes. Many of the successful existing healthcare information systems are not process-oriented, but focus on specific functions like imaging, drug order-entry, laboratory test result storage, storage of diagnoses and progress notes in electronic medical records, alerts and reminders, and billing.

Information systems and decision-support systems for managing patient care processes, however, are still scarcely developed; and the latter is most often accomplished by only a small number of university-led teams. Such patient care management systems are highly complex and pose many challenges: they require availability of encoded data coming from different sources, flexibility in deviating from the encoded process at the discretion of the physician user, and may involve a team of clinical users that together take care of a patient in a coordinated way.

The recent trend towards healthcare networks and integrated care even 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 information 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.

This workshop focuses on research projects which aim at closing this gap. It shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of IT support for healthcare processes, and discuss approaches existing in this context.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines / protocols and decision support

• Process modeling in healthcare

• Workflow management in healthcare

• Semantic integration of healthcare processes with electronic medical records

• Knowledge representation and ontologies for healthcare processes

• Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes

• Visualization, monitoring and mining healthcare processes

• 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

• Patient empowerment in healthcare processes

• Lifecycle management for healthcare processes

• Integrating healthcare processes with electronic medical records

• 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

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 healthcare processes.