Integrated Health Records (IHR) Workshop: Practice and Technology
Call for participation

National eScience Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, 9-10th March, 2006.


Event details: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/648/

Registration now open at: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/648/booking.cfm

Preliminary agenda:  http://www.corealisation.com/IHR06/agenda.html


Registration will be free, but a small fee will be charged for those wishing to attend the 
(optional) workshop dinner on 9th March.

There are a number of places available for those not presenting a paper on a first come, first serve 
basis.

This event follows on from the successful workshop held in 2003 Integrated Care Records: Problems 
and Solutions which aimed to share research and experience of electronic health record projects in 
action. Much has happened in the intervening time. There have been significant developments in 
technologies, progress with (and controversy surrounding) implementation programmes (in England and 
Wales, NPfIT, now Connecting for Health), as well as a shift towards closer integration between 
clinical practice and medical research.

Although the principle goal of integrated health records remains improving care through timely and 
location independent access to medical records, this (complex enough) objective is becoming 
increasingly linked with ambitious agendas relating to e-Health (e.g., personal access to health 
services and information) and e-Science (e.g., use of clinical data for research). At the same time, 
many of the anticipated problems associated with IHR delivery have come to the fore (e.g., data 
quality, clinical acceptance, confidentiality, meshing national and local priorities and systems, 
fit with clinical practice). It is timely, therefore, to reflect on and share experiences of 
delivering the IHR, as well as on its emerging relations with e-Science and e-Health.

This workshop will bring together healthcare practitioners, social care workers, clinical 
researchers, social scientists, e-Scientists and policy makers interested in the problems associated 
with accessing and integrating health care data for service delivery and research. It will focus on 
a range of socio-technical issues pertaining to the deployment of robust, secure, trusted, ethically 
acceptable and usable systems.

While the problems raised by data integration in healthcare mirror those encountered in many areas 
of e-Science, the use of Grid technologies does not yet feature strongly in IHR delivery plans. We 
see this event as an opportunity for the e-Science community to learn of the context and problems of 
clinical record system integration (where, for example, the boundaries between clinical practice and 
research are becoming increasingly blurred), and for the community of healthcare practitioners and 
researchers grappling with record integration to learn how e-Science and Grid technologies may be of 
benefit to them.

Papers were invited on (but not be limited to) the following topics:

- Clinical record keeping practice and their implications for IHR. - IHR implications for clinical 
practice (e.g. data quality, confidentiality).
- Issues raised by the (re-)use of clinical and social data for  research purposes.
- Change management.
- Inter-organisational coordination of practices, data sets, data  quality measures and coding 
schemes. - Relations/communication between users and developers of IHR systems.
- Requirements capture for IHR (techniques, barriers etc).
- Security and confidentiality.
- Technologies and standards to support data integration and IHR  (current solutions as well as the 
potential role for Grid technologies).
- The relationship between IHR, e-Health and e-Science agendas.


Workshop Organisers

Professor Rob Procter (Research Director, National Centre For e-Social Science.)
Professor Jessie Kennedy (School of Computing, Napier University, eSI Research Theme Leader)
Dr Mark Rouncefield (Computing Department, Lancaster University)
Dr Dave Martin (Computing Department, Lancaster University)
Dr Mark Hartswood (School of Informatics, Edinburgh University)
-- 
Alexander Voss, Research Associate
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
1 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW
Office   +44 131 650 4412
Lab      +44 131 650 8288
NTRAC    +44 131 537 3363
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Homepage http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/avoss