The Computing Community Consortium is announcing today a Challenges and Visions Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIX-HS’11), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 28, 2011. MIX-HS’11 will be collocated with the 20th ACM Conference on Information Knowledge and Management. This special MIX-HS’11 track is the latest in a series of “research visions” sessions the CCC is sponsoring at computing research meetings — hoping to provide venues for sharing and discussing forward-looking, visionary ideas for the field, without the constraints of the typical reviewing process.

In conjunction with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic Rochester who are leading the organizing committee — including 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow Cui Tao — the CCC will provide travel awards to the first-, second-, and third-placing paper submissions.

Here’s the official call for papers — due by June 29, 2011:

In cooperation with the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), MIX-HS’11 invites submissions to a special “Challenges and Visions” track. The emphasis of this track will be on visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in research that are outside of the current mainstream topics of the field.

 

Submissions will be judged on the extent to which they expand the possibilities and horizons of the field or challenge existing assumptions prevalent in the field.

 

Submissions to this track should follow the same formatting guidelines as submissions to the research track [i.e., they should be in electronic format conforming to the ACM proceedings style, or ACM templates, “Option 2”], but are limited to at most FOUR pages in length for both submission and final publication. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

 

To submit your paper, click here.

Here’s some background on MIX-HS’11:

Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems, MIXHS’11, aims to be a forum focusing on the latest advances in bio-medical and e-health knowledge and information management research. The workshop will provide an opportunity for sharing practical experiences and best practices in e-health information infrastructure development and management. It will gather experts, researchers, system developers, practitioners and policymakers designing and implementing solutions for managing clinical data and integrating current and future electronic-health systems infrastructures.

 

Issues of biomedical data-mining in large heterogeneous clinical data-sets, information retrieval and extraction in multiple medical repositories, the management of complexity and the coherent update of knowledge in medicine, clinical standards interoperability in distributed health systems and the patient Electronic Health Record (EHR) are now becoming critical to implementing enterprise and nationwide health systems.

 

Topics of interest will include knowledge management activities seeking to address these issues by: (i) using clinical data mining, information extraction and retrieval (ii) standardization of clinical classification (i.e. International Classification of Diseases, ICD), large scale biomedical terminologies and ontologies development (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms, SNOMED CT), (iii) the standardization of clinical information transfer formats (Health Level 7, HL7) and (iv) structuring of clinical documents (Clinical Document Architecture, CDA) and the electronic health records (EHR).

 

[Topics of interest] include but are not limited to:

 

• Bio-medical Data-Mining, Information retrieval and extraction and NLP on biomedical text
• Inference and statistical Models of diseases & Multi-morbidity
• Clinical Information Retrieval, Management and Normalization
• Medical Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Expert and Clinical Decision Support Systems
• Interoperability in Distributed healthcare Systems
• Clinical Information Standards (e.g. HL7) Clinical Terminologies, Classifications (e.g. ICD 10) and biomedical ontologies (e.g. SNOMED – CT)
• Hospital Enterprise Information Management Systems, Electronic Health Record, (EHR), Clinical Document Architecture

To learn more about MIX-HS’11 and the Challenges and Visions Track, click here.

And if you’re interested in running a CCC-sponsored “research visions” session at an upcoming conference, contact us.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)