ORGANIC COMPUTING FOR HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS - Possible Benefits and Challenges

Florian Nafz, Frank Ortmeier, Hella Seebach, Wolfgang Reif

2008

Abstract

Todays health care institutions will undergo major changes in the next two decades. The reason for this is the change of ageing structure in many industrialized countries. In Germany statistics indicate that the costs for health care systems will at least double per person while the number of contributing, working citizens will significantly lower. At the same time average life expectation will rise above 80 years. To cope up with this development adaptations to organization and process of health care are necessary. Typically tasks in stationary health care can be divided in two groups: task which incorporate direct interaction with the patient (care tasks) and tasks which focus on logistics and organization (background tasks). In health care it is not desirable and feasible to reduce efforts in care tasks. So costs and efforts must be reduced within the second group of tasks. This is possible if new paradigms – both in organization and underlying software architecture – are applied. One such paradigm is organic computing. Organic computing aims at systems, which are self-organizing, self-adapting to new challenges and self-optimize during runtime. Such systems can take away a lot of organizatorial work form the staff and thus allow for more and better care without rising budgets. The paper outlines the idea of organic computing as well as opportunities and challenges for applying it in the health care context.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nafz F., Ortmeier F., Seebach H. and Reif W. (2008). ORGANIC COMPUTING FOR HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS - Possible Benefits and Challenges . In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 2: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2008) ISBN 978-989-8111-16-6, pages 286-290. DOI: 10.5220/0001044402860290

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf08,
author={Florian Nafz and Frank Ortmeier and Hella Seebach and Wolfgang Reif},
title={ORGANIC COMPUTING FOR HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS - Possible Benefits and Challenges},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 2: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2008)},
year={2008},
pages={286-290},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001044402860290},
isbn={978-989-8111-16-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 2: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2008)
TI - ORGANIC COMPUTING FOR HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS - Possible Benefits and Challenges
SN - 978-989-8111-16-6
AU - Nafz F.
AU - Ortmeier F.
AU - Seebach H.
AU - Reif W.
PY - 2008
SP - 286
EP - 290
DO - 10.5220/0001044402860290