The discovery and management of medical and health data offers not only opportunities to better treat and manage health-related issues, including containing costs and providing insight into the behaviour of health systems, it also provides a difficult, and therefore interesting and rewarding, domain for information technology research and implementation.

This workshop will showcase some of the leading research in this area bringing together researchers not only from the Australasian region but internationally.

HDKM will be held as part of the Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW 2008), which also includes the following conferences, symposia and workshops:

  • The Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC)
  • The Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE)
  • The Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM)
  • The Australasian Database Conference (ADC)
  • Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium (CATS)
  • The Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM)
  • The Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC)
  • Australasian Symposium on Grid Computing and Research (AUSGRID)
  • The Australasian Information Security Workshop: Privacy Enhancing Systems (AISW)

The Australasian Computer Science Week 2008 will be hosted by the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Wollongong. Registration to APCCM will enable delegates to attend sessions in any conference participating in the Australasian Computer Science Week.

Scope of the Conference

Although information and communications technology has enormous potential for transforming our health care delivery systems, managing health and medical data in electronic format also brings significant challenges that have to be resolved. These include how to store the large amount of complex and diverse data; how to facilitate information retrieval by diverse stakeholders with different objectives; balancing data privacy concerns against clinical and research benefits of data availability; and how to ensure that the captured data will effectively transfer into knowledge that facilitates healthcare decision making.

ACSW invites contributions addressing current research topics in health data and knowledge management. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • conceptual models for health IT systems
  • architecture of health information systems
  • privacy protection
  • security for health systems
  • health data quality -- improving the use and quality of data collections
  • health information modelling
  • workflow management
  • decision support systems
  • health information retrieval, analysis, visualization and prediction
  • health knowledge discovery
  • health knowledge representation and retrieval
  • health schema and data integration
  • modelling spatial, temporal and biological data for health purposes
  • systems for integrated/coordinated care
  • population health surveillance
  • health consumer information systems

Submission of Papers for Review

HDKM invites papers describing original contributions in all fields of medical and health knowledge management and discovery and related areas. Papers should be no more than 10 pages in length conforming to the formatting instructions for the series Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology. Complete instructions for authors regarding formatting procedures can be found at the CRPIT website. (Instructions are available in section Procedures and Resources for Authors.)

Each paper will be judged on its originality, significance, technical quality, relevance to http://crpit.com/ and presentation. Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one author will attend the conference to present the work.

Submissions should be emailed in pdf format only to HDKM2008@ballarat.edu.au by the due date below.

Publication

The proceedings of the conference will be published by the Australian Computer Society as part Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology series (CRPIT) which is also held in full-text on the ACM Digital Library. Each paper will be fully refereed.

In addition, the authors of the best papers from the workshop will be invited to extend their papers for possible inclusion in the electronic Journal of Health Informatics.

Important Dates

Submission of Full Papers:

Sunday 26 August 2007
Notification of Authors:

Friday 28 September 2007
Camera Ready:

Friday 19 October 2007
HDKM Workshop:

Tuesday 22 January to Friday 25 January 2008

Programme Committee

Program Chair:

Ping Yu, University of Wollongong
Members of the Program Committee:

Peter Croll, Queensland University of Technology
Anthony Maeder, e-Health Research Center, CSIRO
Carolyn McGregor, University of Western Sydney
Jon Patrick, University of Sydney
John Roddick, Flinders University
Jim Warren, University of Auckland
Laurie Wilson, CSIRO ICT Centre
John Yearwood, University of Ballarat