(I’m copying the original piece of news from University of Haifa website, here):

The University of Haifa has launched an international and wide-range research project aimed at developing a computerized system that will enable patients who need to be monitored and their healthcare providers to receive updates and medical advice in real time outside clinically-controlled environments. This project will ultimately minimize the need to arrive at an ambulatory clinic or to the hospital for monitoring and follow-up therapy sessions, while improving the continuity of monitoring and enhancing the quality of care. The EU has granted about ¤6 million over the course of four years to fund the project, whose proposal prevailed over sixty other proposals that were submitted.

“Most of the technological components of the system already exist, but until now they have not been integrated and personalized for patient context and use. This project will be integrating and extending the systems and ensuring that the final product will indeed improve patients’ quality of life and lower the doctors’ work load,” said Prof. Mor Peleg, Head of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Haifa and scientific coordinator for the project.

Collaborating in this international research project, given the name “MOBIGUIDE”, are partners from five different countries. The Israeli partners working along with Prof. Peleg and Dr. Pnina Soffer of the University of Haifa are Prof. Eddy Karnieli of Rambam Medical Center, Prof. Yuval Shahar and his team from the Medical Informatics Research Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and innovation management company Beacon Tech. Collaborating with the Israeli team are medical, technological, and academic experts from the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Spain.

The project’s aim is to provide patients who require monitoring to lead their normal lives while receiving continuous monitoring and decision support relating to various aspects of their condition, such as sugar level, heart rate and blood pressure. At first stage, the system will be implemented in Italy to monitor patients suffering from abnormal heart rate, and in Spain to monitor patients suffering from pregnancy complications, such as diabetes and elevated blood pressure. The decision-support recommendations will be communicated to the patients’ mobile phones or could be accessed over the Internet via the patients’ or doctors’ personal computers. The medical data will be automatically collected via portable devices worn by the patients, using a technology developed by research collaborators in the Netherlands. The computerized system, part of which will be supported by the patients’ mobile phones and part on cloud systems, will enable the patients and their doctors to make informed decisions on whether the individual patient can continue conducting routine daily activities or requires a hospital visit. The patient data will be analyzed in real time, and treatment recommendations sent to patients and their doctors, using a technology infrastructure that has been developed by Prof. Shahar’s team at Ben-Gurion University.

Over the past decade, the Medical Informatics Research Center at Ben-Gurion University, headed by Prof. Shahar and staffed by experienced researchers, most of whom are graduate students, has developed a unique technology that is serving as the backbone for the MOBIGUIDE project. It provides tools that enable computerized representation of medical knowledge, tools for analysis and interpretation of medical knowledge relating to patients with chronic illnesses over time, and tools for application of the knowledge for purposes of medical decision support or for clinical research. All of these tools have undergone stringent testing over the past few years at medical research centers in Israel and the United States that are collaborating with the research being conducted at the Ben-Gurion Medical Informatics Research Center. These tools and additional applications developed by the various MOBIGUIDE partners, such as links to European medical databases, intelligent real-time monitoring methods, and innovative interfaces for patients and physicians, will form the core functioning of the MOBIGUIDE system.

According to Prof. Peleg, the system will provide advice that is specific to more than just the patient’s medical data: with the help of a technology being developed by the University of Haifa with European research collaborators, the system will know the patients’ socio-economic status, family status and even if they are abroad at the time of monitoring. “The system aims to adapt treatment to the personal and not just clinical state of the patient. As such, for example, the system would provide different recommendations to a person living alone and to a person who has the help of family members. In this system, the patient’s data, integrated from the hospital’s medical records, the monitoring devices, and the decision-support system, will belong to the patient and not to the medical institution that generated it. This way, the patient will be able to arrive at the closest hospital and grant the local physicians access to his/her medical data, which would be able be retrieved via the Internet,” explained Prof. Peleg.

Ben-Gurion University’s technology transfer company, BGN Technologies, has recently established MediLogos Co., implementing the time-dependent advanced data analysis technologies and computer-assisted monitoring and treatment for patients with chronic illness technologies, which have been developed at Ben-Gurion’s Medical Informatics Research Center.

Photo (above): The international team gathered at the University of Haifa

MobiGuide: Guiding Patients Anytime Everywhere

The Mobiguide project is a so-called large-scale integrated project (IP) in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the EU. The project that is being coordinated at the Department of Information Systems at the University of Haifa (HU) by Prof. Mor Peleg from the PKD group. The project’s duration is 4 years and is expected to start on October 1st, 2011.

MobiGuide will develop a patient guidance system that integrates hospital and monitoring data into a Personal Health Record (PHR) accessible by patients and care providers and provide personalized secure clinical-guideline-based guidance also outside clinical environments. MobiGuide’s ubiquity will be achieved by having a Decision Support System (DSS) at the back end, and on the front end by utilizing Body Area Network (BAN) technology and developing a coordinated light-weight DSS that can operate independently. Personalization will be achieved by considering patient preferences and context. Retrospective data analysis will be used to assess compliance and to indicate care pathways shown to be beneficial for certain patient context.
MobiGuide will be validated on pre-selected clinical domains with intensive vs. sparse monitoring to demonstrate the generality of the design and assess functionality, feasibility, and impact.

MobiGuide addresses EU priorities: increasing patient safety, ubiquitous secure access to health care, patient empowerment, developing a common platform for healthcare services, and competitiveness of Europe.
The time is right for MG in view of Europe’s vast interest in national PHRs and patient empowerment. MobiGuide will leverage this momentum to create a solution that goes beyond local proprietary and stand-alone EMR, DSS, and BAN.

Our team includes complementary partners with diverse experience in: patient guideline-based DSS, focusing on reasoning with patient guideline intentions and temporal patterns, decision-theoretic models, knowledge-data integration, and information visualization Health BAN, telemedicine data analysis for diabetes, telemedicine applications for cardiology and expertise in large system integration to create the secure PHR.

Our consortium includes 13 complementary partners from academia, industry, and healthcare institutions in 5 different countries, with diverse experience in: patient guideline-based DSS, focusing on reasoning with patient guideline intentions and temporal patterns, decision-theoretic models, knowledge-data integration, and information visualization Health BAN, telemedicine data analysis for diabetes, telemedicine applications for cardiology and expertise in large system integration to create the secure PHR. The partners include the University of Haifa Israel, Ben-Gurion University, Israel, University of Pavia, Italy, University of Twente, The Netherlands, Vienna University of Technology, Austia, Mobihealth Co., The Netherlands, Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri Clinica Del Lavoro e della Riabilitazione, Italy, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, Corporació Sanitaria Parc Tauli, Spain, ATOS Origin, Spain, Beacon Tech Ltd., Israel, ZorgGemak BV, The Netherlands, and Catalonia Diabetic Association, Spain.

Así que nada, en el siguiente post os cuento lo que voy a hacer próximamente, que eso si que es fuerte

El Pacto del Euro from ATTAC.TV on Vimeo.

Más claro el agua, amigos míos…

I proudly admit, one of those was written by us.  Sucess is a journey, not a destination

Particularly, I enjoyed the explanation about how real problems need different planning approaches,  basically depending on the things that you want to plan. Basically, deliberative planning ( traditional HTN planners) is used for long-term planning where the problem to be solved is goal-driven, while reactive planning (also known as continual planning) is used for short-term planning, in dynamic enviroments where changes can occur and you need to react quickly to those changes. Of course, usually both are needed and should be intertwined. A great related quote, from D. Einsenhower, says “Plans are nothing; Planning is everything”. And that’s true, isn’t it?.

By hearing this discussion, I recalled the last post I wrote here about how could P&S could help in the field of BPM/ACM. The key  is of course to find a technology that you can apply to BPM, that could be supported by both approaches commented before. Not only you need to plan a process, that can be goal-driven, but usually the enviroment of that process changes, and you need to react somehow to those changes. These are some of the research themes that we pursue in our Research Group.

Even if using P&S for BPM can be very promising, I think that clearly the main research problem that have to be focused within this area is the dynamism that a Process can suffer during its life-cycle. When I say dynamism, I refer to the changes in the environment and/or the process model itself, that could happen once that the process has been started. These changes in the environment are the main reason for the emergence of a new area called “Adaptive Case Management”, and a very interesting panel discussion took place in the conference, driven by Keith Swenson, Dana Khoyi, Dermot McCauley and Jacob Ukelson. I was lucky to talk with Dermot McCauley, and what he told me is basically exposed in this excellent blog post at Column2, which briefly overview ACM as well.

In this panel discussion, K. Swenson gave a good definition of what ACM is, by using the “House” serial as example, and where decisions are made “on the fly” by the doctor, where the execution path cannot be predefined. Then, I came out with an issue: even if this is inevitable, doctors also try to do their own processes repeatable, capturing their models into what they call Clinical Guideline Protocols. So, as it is said in Column 2 blog, they look for a “happy path” showing what the patient treatment should be like. Hence, “this is not purely unstructured process, where there is no predefined model, but dynamic BPM where the model is predefined but can be readily changed while in flight.“. We can see that BPM and ACM can coexist.

So, if P&S techniques are going to be used in order to help to control and manage the technical problems associated with this dynamism, we must have clear in mind that P&S should be able to manage *at least*:

* exogenous events that can occur, even without having previously been foreseen in the process model, that changes either the model or the execution path.
* changes in the process model itself (skip tasks, add new tasks).
* changes in the enviroment (conditions of the knowledge workers, new knowledge workers, controlling the busy or available states).
* different (and possibly concurrent) execution paths, i.e. cases can be interrelated.

From my point of view, I see that P&S could be able to offer these features, by interleaving different planning stages, where the start and end points of these planning stages are delimited by the time at which the changes occur. Furthermore, there is already strong research open in continual planning, plan monitoring, re-planning and plan repair, which is similar and can be used for the problems arisen in this post.

Update: More insights into our very first approach in this direction can also be explored in the paper “Integrating plans into BPM technologies for Human-Centric Process Execution” presented at KEPS 2010.

Source: Paul Thagard. “MIND: Introduction to Cognitive Science.” Second Edition, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets.

La verdad es que me apasiona la idea de visitar por primera vez EEUU, justo en mi primer tercio de siglo, es un buen modo de celebrarlo. También me alucina poder presentar mi trabajo allí, por supuesto.

Manhattan skyline...

Por ahora me aseguro una visita al Top of the Rock para ver el skyline al atardecer, y otra visita al Radio City Music Hall, donde con suerte podré ver en directo al grupo de música Pop Vampire Weekend. Prefiero esta opción al tradicional musical en Brooklyn…qué le vamos a hacer, antes muerto que sencillo.

Se aceptan sugerencias, que se que los que me leéis sois mu viajeros. Otra cosa muy distinta es que me de tiempo… ojalá

Anita de Waard : The Future of the Journal – A Proposal for Workflow-Based Science Publishing
We propose a conceptual format that forms the basis of a truly new way of
publishing science. In our proposal, all scientific communication objects
(including experimental workflows, direct results, email conversations, and
all drafted and published information artifacts) are labeled and stored in
a great, big, distributed data store (or many distributed data stores, that
are all connected). Each item has a set of metadata attached to it, which
includes (at least) the person and time it was created, the type of object
it is, and the status of the object including intellectual property rights
and ownership. Every researcher can (and must) deposit every knowledge item
that is produced in the lab into this repository. With this deposition
goes an essential metadata component that states who has the rights to see,
use, distribute, buy or sell this item.

There are two things needed to make this vision a reality: first, the
development of an exact, rich, future-proof set of metadata tags, which are
versatile enough to handle all the tasks described above, but not so
enormous that the system or the user are bogged down by them. Secondly,
tools need to be developed that allow the efficient storage, markup,
linking and retrieval of the multifarious data items that are to be added.
Both of these are close to being available.