HDL 2005: Healthcare Digital Libraries Workshop 2005

 

to be held in conjunction with ECDL 2005

 

 

22th September 2005, Vienna, Austria  

 

 

Workshop Chairs:

Patty Kostkova, City ehealth Research Centre, Institute of Health Sciences, City University, London, UK

Anne Adams, UCL Interaction Centre, UCL, London, UK

 

 

 

 

Abstracts and Talks

 

 

 

Keynote Speech: Advanced Digital Libraries in Healthcare and their application to Virtual Electronic Health Records and Telemonitoring                                                                  

 

Heiko Schuldt, University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT), Austria

The area of Digital Libraries (DLs) is currently subject to fundamental changes. First generation DLs have been the result of content-centric, isolated efforts of making available static digital information. Nowadays, DLs are considered in a much broader sense, e.g., jointly providing access to distributed content sources or addressing also content that is subject to frequent changes. This talk addresses these fundamental changes, the technologies that are required, and presents two applications of advanced Digital Libraries in healthcare to illustrate this development: Virtual Electronic Health Records and Telemonitoring. The former aims at combining distributed digital artefacts that correspond to parts of the digital health record of a patient stored by different healthcare providers. The latter addresses the continuous monitoring of patients by processing and analyzing physiological information coming from wearable sensors. Both applications are currently under investigation at UMIT within the EU Network of Excellence DELOS (a Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries).

 

 

Semantic Service Composition and Co-ordination in CASCOM

                                                                                                                                                                      

Thorsten Moeller, Heiko Schuldt, UMIT, Austria

Andreas Gerber, Matthias Klusch, German Research Centre for AI, Germany

Semantic (Web) services allow for a fine-grained description of the functionality of single services and highly facilitate the combination and composition of several services into processes. The traditional workflow and process management approach considers the definition of a process at buildtime without taking into account the service instances that are actually available at run-time. Moreover, failures have to be anticipated in order to define appropriate failure handling strategies. In this paper, we present an agent-based approach where process execution is distributed among a set of agents. A dedicated planning component composes semantic services based on the particular goals of an application. In case of failures, the planner is re-invoked in order to define contingency execution strategies. Finally, instance matchmaking is done at run-time by choosing the most appropriate service provider (according to pre-defined quality-of-service constraints). The focus of this paper is on the interaction of planning, matchmaking, and execution of processes (compound services) consisting of invocations of semantic web services. In the EU-funded project CASCOM, these technologies are currently applied to the composition of semantic services from the healthcare domain in order to  run individualized applications (processes), thereby providing access to an eHealth digital library of services and data.

 

 

Agents in Online Healthcare Digital Library Management of the National Resource for Infection Control 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Talk Available

Steve D’Souza, Patty Kostkova, CeRC, City University, London, UK

In this paper, we describe a specification for the use of agents within the National Resource for Infection Control (NRIC - www.nric.org.uk) in the UK.

The National Resource for Infection Control is an Internet medical digital library that provides a single point of access to quality appraised, evidence based information within the field of infection control.

One of the most important aspects of running an online healthcare digital library is the improvement of the functionality provided to the users, in order to facilitate the transfer of information in as useful a manner as possible. Software agents can help solve some of the problems involved in this process in an efficient manner. The methods by which agents may be used in this scenario to aid the improvement of this digital library are detailed here.

 

 

Health Service DL Alerting:  Users, Requirements and Design 

                                                                                                                                                                                              

Talk Available

George Buchanan, Anne Adams, UCLIC, UCL, London, UK

Doris Jung, Annika Hinze, University of Waikato, New Zealand

In the health domain, there are many circumstances where clinicians and patients wish to track changes in medical knowledge. However, existing ‘news’ or ‘alert’ services provide relatively limited means for selecting which information to receive. This results in clinicians and patients receiving information that is inappropriate, irrelevant or simply too voluminous.

In this paper, we detail alerting-relevant findings from several user studies incorporating both clinical staff (across several hospitals) and patients’ perceptions. These findings demonstrate the importance of context, both in terms of the user’s task and immediate environment. We introduce a novel alerting architecture that can provide a more finely tailored stream of alerts to the user, and provides further support to assist the interpretation of received material

 

 

Patient information needs: before and after doctor consultations  

                                                                                                                                                                                       

Talk Available

Simon Attfield, Anne Adams, UCLIC, UCL, London, UK

This paper details findings from a study of information seeking by National Health Service patients which explored motivational triggers for information needs. Previous research has highlighted the importance of contextual elements in users changing information needs. This paper highlights how those needs may center on specific real world events and in particular a patient’s consultation with their doctor.  Patients initiate information seeking to identify a need a clinical intervention, in preparation for the patient / doctor consultation and to verify the diagnosis or treatment stemming from that consultation. The findings reveal confidence in health practitioners as one key motivation for information seeking. A discussion is presented around fears about patients’ use of information.

 

 

The impact of authentication on health digital resources  

                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Talk Available

Anne Adams, UCLIC, UCL, London, UK

Security is a major issue within the health domain.  It is important to ensure that sensitive personalised data is protected from misuse.  However, there is also a need for efficient medical systems that don’t impede clinicians work practices.  This paper will briefly detail some of the authentication issues that have been highlighted within two comparative hospital studies in the health domain.   93 clinicians’ perceptions towards clinical information resources were analysed whereby security and authentication issues were highlighted as a critical issue.  This paper details how those issues related to organisational structures and discusses how authentication and security must be designed around communities of practice.

 

 

Design Research: The Deferred Actions of the design of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI)      

                                                                                                                    

Talk Available

Nandish Patel, Brunel University, London, UK

Patty Kostkova, CeRC, City University, London, UK

Design research is concerned with developing knowledge of the design process. However, do theoretical system design theories meet the needs of system development in the real world setting? Are technical decisions made and justified on according to system theories or do social, political and financial factors prevail?  We investigated the evolution of technical design, specification and development milestones of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI) in the UK, one of the major government initiatives in the area of infectious diseases. By investigating project documentation, internal and formal specifications, informal email discussions where key technical decisions we made, we found out that the digital library design was rather unsystematic. We applied Purao’s standard descriptive model of design to understand the design of NeLI and compare the design process with the Theory of Deferred Action, which argues that rather than design being systematic it is subject to deferred action. In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary findings of this a work-in-progress project