The Evolution of Healthcare Applications in the Web 2.0 Era - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 304

The term Medicine 2.0 [8] has been introduced by the Journal of Medical Internet
Research (JMIR) (http://www.jmir.org) and the International Medical Informatics
Association (http://www.imia.org) as name for a conference series (http://www.
medicine20congress.com). Medicine 2.0 has a broader scope than Health 2.0 and its
applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers,
caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, who use Web
2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facili-
tate specifically social networking, participation, collaboration, and openness within
and between these user groups.
A survey of collaborative services and their applications in Healthcare and Medical
communities is presented in the following section.
3 Collaborative Services in Medical and Healthcare Communities
Despite the achievements of web and its services, it was necessary that patients seek
for medical information and that patients contact their doctors for consultation, diag-
nosis or treatment. The advent of Web 2.0 changed this uni-directional flow of infor-
mation. Now, all community members, even patients are able to feed the community
with news, advices and personal experiences. Moreover, the request-serve model has
changed towards a push-pull model where information is accumulated by community
members and is made available to all community members through intelligent ser-
vices. Patients receive useful alerts and doctors get notifications on medical advances,
new medicines and therapies.
In [18], the term Web 2.0, is perceived to encompass a set of services, which ex-
tend Web 1.0 capabilities and emphasize on the community and collaboration aspects.
In [22] and [23] authors present how medical communities can be used in favor of pa-
tients and how communication and collaboration between members of the healthcare
community can be hosted in a community platform. The utter aim of any medical and
healthcare community is to assist patients, either directly by providing medical care or
indirectly by improving medical knowledge. Depending on the specific targets of the
community (e.g. practitioners' education, patients' support, etc.) the members, the
roles and the use of web 2.0 services differentiate.
Fig. 1. How the medical mesh transforms into a community