The Evolution of Healthcare Applications in the Web 2.0 Era - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 308

• Medical associations provide the professionals with guidelines on patient

treatment and inform patients on topics such as prevention, self protection
etc. They issue specifications for companies that produce medical devices
and medications.

• Healthcare companies advertise their products (devices, therapies, medical

applications) to doctors, nurses and patients.

• Healthcare practitioners get informed on new findings, emerging therapies

and medical approaches and sometimes get online training. In parallel, they
guide nurses and patients' families on patient-care and provide researchers
and associations with useful feedback on emerging patient needs.

• Patients are receivers of support, treatment, care, information and advertise-

ment from all other participants. They contribute to the community, as end
users of the community outcomes and as specimens of surveys.

Fig. 2. The medical community structure

As it is depicted in Figure 2, the medical community should provide different level
of accessibility to visitors, registered members and special members such as doctors
or scientists. The nucleus of the virtual community should be equally accessible to
members and visitors. More specifically, the community portal must be accessible to
every web visitor or web service (bot) that wishes to browse or process the published