Information Quality in e-Health. Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 7058

Abstract

Medical information systems are already highly sophisticated; however, while computer performance has increased exponentially, human cognitive evolution cannot advance at the same speed. Consequently, the focus on interaction and communication between humans and computers is of increasing importance in medicine and healthcare. The daily actions of medical professionals must be the central concern of any innovation. Simply surrounding and supporting them with new and emerging technologies is not sufficient if these increase rather than decrease the workload. Information systems are a central component of modern knowledge-based medicine and health services; therefore, it is necessary for knowledge management to continually be adapted to the needs and demands of medical professionals within this environment of steadily increasing high-tech medicine. Information processing, in particular its potential effectiveness in modern health services and the optimization ofprocesses and operational sequences, is also of increasing interest. It is particularly important for medical information systems (e.g., hospital information systems and decision support systems) to be designed with the daily schedules, responsibilities and exigencies of the medical professionals in mind. Within the context of this symposium our end users are medical professionals and justifiably expect the software technology to provide a clear benefit: to support them efficiently and effectively in their daily activities. In biomedicine, healthcare, clinical medicine and the life sciences, professional end users are confronted with an increased mass of data. Research in human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) or knowledge discovery in databases and data mining (KDD) has long been working to develop methods that help users to identify, extract, visualize and understand useful information from these masses of high-dimensional and mostly weakly structured data. HCI and IR/KDD, however, take very different perspectives in tackling this challenge; and historically, they have had little collaboration. Our goal is to combine these efforts to support professionals in interactively analyzing information properties and visualizing the relevant information without becoming overwhelmed. The challenge is to bring HCI and IR/KDD researchers to work together and hence reap the benefits that computer science/informatics can provide to the areas of medicine, healthcare and the life sciences