Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The Web attracted more patients and increased the popularity of freely available
medical advice and knowledge. The abundance of web sites that offer medical content
affected the way patients face their doctors, gave them a second opinion and increased
their awareness.
Its' successor, Web 2.0, was built on the same technologies and concepts but added
a layer of semantic abstraction , offered a network as a platform sensation and gave a
social networking aspect to medical information systems.
Patients, instead of seeking medical information and requesting medical advice on
their issues, are supplied with useful news, when medical advances take place. Pa-
tients are able to discuss their issues with other patients and collectively develop a
medical knowledge base with easy to use tools. The plethora of tools and platforms
available enhances the inventory of medical practitioners and can be of value to them
and their patients if properly exploited. This paper gives an overview of these tools,
discusses the merits of their use and the potential hazards that should be avoided.
In the following section we enlist the major technological novelties of Web 2.0
under the prism of certain applications and explain how they led to Heath 2.0. In
section 3 we examine a community based approach, which combines the aforemen-
tioned novelties, under the prism of intelligent information management and in sec-
tion 4 we discuss the potential merits of this approach and the issues that should be
considered.
2 From Web to Web 2.0, Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0
Internet and its services had a major impact on health care and medical information.
First, it opened public access to medical information, which was previously restricted
to health care providers. Of all searches on the Internet, 4.5% have been calculated to
be health-related [7]. The patients feel empowered before reaching their doctors [1],
since they find or ask for information on the web. They get an idea about their diag-
nosis and treatment options and want to actively participate in therapeutic decisions.
As a result, the way of interaction between the patient and the doctor, has changed.
Similarly the way people perceive medical information has changed.
2.1 Medical Information and Web-Based Applications
The seek for direct medical consultation gained place from searching and browsing of
medical information and this is another fact of change in the way of communication
between doctors and patients. "Ask the doctor services" [25], initially deployed
through e-mail, kept record of questions and replies by expert physicians and pub-
lished results to the web for further reference [26]. Web sites have been also created
in order to alert or support patients [12] and offer informative content, provide direc-
tions for prevention, cure and symptoms' handling and of course sample questions and
feedback from physicians.
Electronic assessment is another healthcare application which gained great atten-
tion. Online questionnaires, symptom checklists etc. were used in order to increase the
interactivity of web based medical applications. Short screening tests [13], [21],
helped people to detect and overcome their addictions, alerted them and reminded
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