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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 H=C3=B6st, Lund University, (Sweden)
Stefan Jahnichen, 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