Manfred Reichert is co-organizer of the 7th Int’l Workshop on Process-Oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’14), which will be held in conjunction with the 12th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2014) in Haifa, Israel at 8 September 2014 – the BPM conference series provides the most prestigious forum for researchers and practitioners in the BPM field. Manfred shares this task with his colleagues Mor Peleg (University of Haifa, Israel) and Richard Lenz (University of Erlangen-Nurnberg).

About the Workshop

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.

Further details and the call for papers can be found on the workshop's website.