Process Support and Knowledge Representation in Health Care

This book comprises thoroughly refereed and revised papers from the BPM'12 Joint Workshop on Process-Oriented Information Systems and Knowledge Representation in Health Care (ProHealth'12 / KR4HC'12), which was held in Tallinn, Estonia, in September 2012.
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.