Target deliverables for the workshop

Below we list our three main goals for this workshop and associated deliverables:

  • Promote collaborations: Encourage understanding and collaboration among diverse disciplinary groups in the community (CS, IS, Medical/Health); beyond the meeting itself, which will offer many opportunities for interactions among participants, a key additional deliverable will be an online environment called the "BIOMEDWEB.INFO" that will be used to share critical information associated with research activities of potential interest to members of the community (e.g., upcoming meetings, workshops, and conferences) and to disseminate data, group discussions, and relevant documents.
  • Accelerate ongoing research: Help promote standardization of electronic health records and creation of authoritative benchmark evaluation data to accelerate research in this area; for this goal we aim to discuss creation of an electronic health records cyberinfrastructure and generate a plan for launching an environment and incrementally scaling it to accommodate the needs of the research community.
  • Set research agenda: Identify and prioritize a small set of research topics that will aid funding agencies and research institutions to develop research programs that are strategically smart and likely to deliver solutions in the near future; the deliverable associated with this goal is a white paper that will be produced by the organizing committee of the workshop based on feedback from the participants.

Some specific topics that we will cover include:

  • Data Acquisition: Capturing data and natural language processing
  • Data Standards: Focus on limitations of current standards such as the HL7V3 standard but also potential utility of emerging standards
  • Semantic Interoperability: Vocabularies, ontologies, and techniques for semantic level sharing of data
  • Data Management: Beyond the capture stage, management challenges associated with scale, heterogeneity, distributed, and the fragmentary nature of data
  • Data Presentation: Visual, adaptive, and optimal presentation of data for enhancing use and understanding
  • Data Services: Emerging applications for supporting research, quality and safety management, public health studies, etc.