Knowledge Representation for Health Care - HEC 2016 International Joint Workshop, KR4HC/ProHealth 2016, Munich, Germany, September 2, 2016, Revised Selected Papers

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of two workshops held at the International Conference on Health – Exploring Complexity and Medical Informatics Europe, HEC 2016, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2016: the 8th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care, KR4HC 2016, and the 9th International Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare, ProHealth 2016

Flexible Support of Healthcare Processes

Traditionally, healthcare information systems have focused on the support of predictable and repetitive clinical processes. Even though the latter can be often prespecified in formal process models, process flexibility in terms of dynamic adaptability is indispensable to cope with exceptions and unforeseen situations. Flexibility is further required to accommodate the need for evolving healthcare processes and to properly support healthcare process variability. In addition, process-aware information systems are increasingly used to support less structured healthcare processes (i.e., patient treatment processes), which can be characterized as knowledge-intensive. Healthcare processes of this category are neither fully predictable nor repetitive and, therefore, they cannot be fully prespecified at design time. The partial unpredictability of these processes, in turn, demands a certain amount of looseness. This chapter deals with the characteristic flexibility needs of both prespecified and loosely specified healthcare processes. In addition, it presents fundamental flexibility features required to address these flexibility needs as well as to accommodate them in healthcare practice