Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC09)

An ICSE 2009 Workshop
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/events/icse2009/home/

Dates: May 18-19, 2009
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

http://www-swe.informatik.uni-heidelberg.de/sehc09/index.htm


Background 
The proposed workshop will build upon the success of the ICSE 2008 Software Engineering in Healthcare track. The need for the effective infusion of technology into the healthcare domain is widely recognized, and has been for a long time already a focus in the Medical Informatics community (see for example MIE). The technology infusion induces many computer science issues which have been recently the subject of a number of diverse workshops (e.g. the MOTHIS series, and the 2nd Int. Workshop on e-Health Services and Technologies). This workshop focuses specifically on the software engineering issues arising in the healthcare domain. The ICSE 2008 track identified many of these issues. But it was also clear that a lot of work was just beginning. 
This workshop is intended to *** bring together researchers and practitioners interested in software engineering issues in this exciting and important area, and to enable this growing community to sharpen the definition of the key issues***.

Scope
Healthcare is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world today. More-over, with a turnover of €11 billion, information and communication technology for healthcare has the potential to become one of the largest components in this sector (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/health/whatis_ehealth/index_en.htm), and indeed perhaps one of the largest economic sectors in the economy of the 21st century. In addition to economic importance, this sector also has the clear potential to make substantial contributions to the comfort and longevity of every human being on the face of the earth.
Software Engineering has an important role to play in all of this. We note that the devices that play increasingly important roles in health care depend more and more upon software. These devices need to interoperate smoothly, and function effectively as parts of the larger healthcare processes and enterprises in which they participate. Devices and processes need to support human participation in ways that humans understand and welcome. All of this raises important questions about software quality, user interfaces, systems interoperability, process automation, and many other questions that are quite familiar to software engineering practitioners and researchers. 

Structure
For these reasons the ICSE 2009 Workshop on Software Engineering in Healthcare invites very broad participation from people who are actively engaged in identifying key research and technological issues, including those who are doing so through their actual practice of healthcare, and those who are developing prototypes and solutions aimed at dealing with these issues. The workshop consists of paper presentations, panel-led discussions, and invited speakers. The workshop will be two days in length.

Example topics include, but are not limited to 
* Software engineering for healthcare systems (subsuming information systems and devices)
* Software quality issues in health care systems and processes
* The effective integration of medical devices into overall healthcare systems and processes
* Determining the quality of the software in embedded medical devices
* Requirements Engineering for health care processes and systems (involving many different stakeholders)
* Healthcare process definition, analysis, automation, and improvement
* Architectures for healthcare systems and system integration
* User interface issues in health care systems and processes
* Healthcare issues in Aging-in-place (Eldercare)
* Other software engineering topics relevant to health care systems and processes


Submitted Papers: Submissions are solicited that address both research and practice. Research contributions address what software engineering research either has or might contribute to the improvement of healthcare practice. Practice papers and Experience reports discuss lessons learned, key unaddressed problems, and experiences of practitioners, with special focus on issues that seem particularly ripe as topics of software engineering research. Note that we will be interested not only in suggestions of tools and systems that seem needed, but also in ways in which existing software engineering understandings might lead to deeper understandings of, and solutions to, current healthcare problems. We invite original, unpublished submissions in the following categories: 

* Research papers that describe how software engineering techniques, understandings, systems, or tools have, or might, make a substantial improvement in health care systems and process understandings or effectiveness. We are interested in successful applications of tools to health care systems problems. But we are also interested in the application or applicability of software engineering understandings on such issues as quality, interoperability, user interfaces, and process definition, or on more fundamental improvements in health care. While reports on successes are most welcome, we are also interested in well-reasoned and articulate papers describing the potential of software engineering approaches and systems for addressing important health care problems. 

* Practice papers that describe the application of one or more software engineering practice(s) in health care. A case study provides a detailed description of how the practice was applied and why (what problems it was intended to address), along with the results achieved. 
* Experience reports of projects that provide a critical review of experiences during one or more phases of a health care development project, and draw lessons learned from that experience. A good experience report describes as completely as possible the factors that influenced those experiences and reports the final results as rigorously as possible, so that the impact of those experiences on project success or failure can be understood. Experience reports may focus on problems encountered during development along with discussions of what principles, techniques, methods, processes, or tools were used and whether they were sufficient for solving the problem. 

* Position Statements: We anticipate complementing the technical paper presentations of more mature ideas and work with panel sessions aimed at exploring ideas, technologies, and approaches that are still in a more formative state. We invite the submission of Position Statements from people wishing to advance these more formative ideas. The panel sessions will be prime vehicles for eliciting the ideas and opinions of the authors of accepted Position Statements. Some of these authors may be invited to join some of these panels, as seems appropriate. Other panel members will be invited by the workshop organizers when it seems that their ideas and presentations are likely to engender lively discussion and debate. The workshop Program Committee will invite proposals for panel sessions, but will also pursue their own ideas for the subjects of workshop panels. 

Submission Structure
We invite full papers, and position statements. We acknowledge that important contributions may be made in the form of preliminary results, as this is a very new area. Thus we note that a case study, an experience report, or a research report might be either a full paper or a position statement, depending upon the maturity of the idea, or experience. Both full papers and position statements will be reviewed by the Program Committee and both types of submissions will be published in the workshop proceedings. 

In all cases, the submission’s format will have to conform to the published ICSE 2009 format and submission guidelines (http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/events/icse2009/home/). Position statements will have to be at least two pages long, but will not be allowed to exceed four pages, and full papers will have to be less than eleven pages in length (including all text, figures, references and appendices). The results described in these submissions will have to be original, and not under review elsewhere at the time of review by the Workshop Program Committee. 

The accepted workshop papers including both regular and position papers will be published in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries. Workshop papers will be published in a separate volume of ICSE 2009 Proceedings. Workshop attendees will receive a memory stick with both proceedings volumes of ICSE 2009 papers and all workshop papers on it.

Authors of accepted papers are required to register for the workshop and present the paper at the workshop in order for the paper to be included in the proceedings and ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries. After the workshop, the authors of selected best papers will be invited to submit a significantly revised and extended version of their papers for consideration of publication in a special issue in a journal, which will be subject to another round of refereeing.


Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: January 7th, 2009
Notice of paper acceptance: February 1st, 2009
Final versions of papers to publisher: February 19th, 2009

Program Committee:
Elske Ammenwerth, UMIT (Austria)
Jytte Brender McNair, Aalborg University (Denmark)
Ruth Breu, University of Innsbruck (Austria)
Lori A. Clarke, University of Massachusetts (USA)
Farzin Guilak, Intel Corp. (USA)
Mats Heimdahl, University of Minnesota (USA)
Martin Höst, Lund University, (Sweden)
Stefan Jähnichen, TU Berlin (Germany)
Leon J. Osterweil, University of Massachusetts (USA), cochair
Barbara Paech, Heidelberg University, (Germany), cochair
Pradeep Ray, University of New South Wales (Australia)
Joachim Reiss, Siemens Corp. (Germany)
Janos Sztipanovits, Vanderbilt University (USA)
Marlon Vieira, Siemens Corporate Research (USA)
Jens Weber-Jahnke, University of Victoria, (Canada)
Alfred Winter, University of Leipzig (Germany)
And OTHERS TO BE NAMED