The 4th International Workshop on Infrastructures for Healthcare: Global Healthcare will be in Tromsø in 2013 - organized by Gunnar Ellingsen and Pernille Bjørn.

 We hope to see you all again.

Call for papers for special issue International Journal Medical Informatics (IJMI): Infrastructures in Healthcare: Global Health. Download pdf

The Third international workshop: Infrastructures for Healthcare was held at the IT University of Copenhagen June 23rd and June 24th 2011. Download proceedings (4.9 MB pdf)

Note: Due to many requests and conflicts with other deadlines we have extended the deadline for submission of paper to Monday February 14th 2011.

Co-chairs:
Associate professor Pernille Bjørn, Technologies in Practices, IT University of Copenhagen
Professor Finn Kensing, Computer Science, Copenhagen University

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The workshop follows the two previous workshops organized at the Technical University of Denmark in June 2006, and at Copenhagen University in June 2009. What is special with the IHC workshop is that it attracts researchers, health care professionals, IT professionals, administrators, IT companies, and others engaged in the development of infrastructures and new, integrated applications and services for improving the quality of health care services.

The purpose of this third international workshop is to continue this forum for discussing current issues and trends related to the integration and coordination of health care practices across institutional, organizational, professional, and global boundaries.

Healthcare has increasingly become a global phenomenon. Even the work within the smallest clinic is inevitably affected by global aspects such as research network of treatment practices and support network of patient groups. The global infrastructures thus affect the local infrastructures and vice versa. Global phenomena such as the increase in patients with chronic diseases also pushes the boundaries for healthcare creating a network of technologies, people, and social arrangement as treatment of one patient involves different professions spread over several institutions and organizational boundaries spanning across various distributed networks. Shortage of local national resources such as workforce, labs, and medical instruments also increases the need to discuss new opportunities to re-think healthcare in a global economy. Finally, global healthcare re-introduces telemedicine and e-health, since new technological opportunities enables complex medical practices, where the patient and the healthcare professional are geographically distributed. In a globalized world policy makers, health care professionals, IT professionals, and researchers share an increasingly pressing interest in understanding, designing, and creating innovative systems of care, which improve communication, coordination, and collaboration among patients and healthcare professionals.

We wish to bring international researcher, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, administrators, and IT companies together to re-think and discuss new opportunities for healthcare technologies, medical practices, and global infrastructures. We wish to highlight how new global infrastructures – socio-technical assemblages – simultaneously connect existing practices, influence and change these practices, and create entirely new practices in health care work (e.g. related to the maintenance of the global infrastructure itself). What characterizes infrastructures in health care? What role do they play in transforming and reorganizing health care and in creating new actors in health care? How are infrastructures established and maintained? What is the impact on work practices, organizational structures, cost effectiveness, quality of care, and continuity of care?

The workshop is organized as a two-day workshop with four keynote speakers in total and we are proud to announce our confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Professor of Technology Design & Assessment at Vienna University of Technology

Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras at Chennai, India

Dr. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Assistant Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), the Pennsylvania State University