The Evolution of Healthcare Applications in the Web 2.0 Era - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 311

Other collaboration services comprise, virtual workbenches, virtual blackboard etc.
The results and history of collaboration services are usually stored and used as a refer-
ence by other community members. Such applications usually require specialized soft-
ware and dedicated sources and thus are not widely used for medical education. The
educational potential of virtual worlds has attracted the interest of medical communities,
and created new opportunities for medical education in the cyberspace [2], [19].
When a teleconference room is available, distant courses can be performed from
the joint institutes. Tutors and students communicate using real-time video over a
streamed media server. Educational multimedia content (i.e. medical videos from
surgeries, recorder sessions or courses etc.) can be stored in media repositories, and
made available to community members. Free video hosting servers can be used for
this task, however, bandwidth and storage limitations, restricted access and other is-
sues should be considered.
The applications presented in the bottom section of figure 2, can be accessible both
to students and tutors, however the degree of participation increases for students as
moving from left to the right. All these services (i.e. wikis, streaming media, news
feed, forum, chat, workbench etc.) can be offered through separate tools and plat-
forms or ideally through the same Web Based CMS.
The next section illustrates the gains from the use of Web 2.0 tools for individuals,
companies, organizations and healthcare and medicine in general.
4 Discussion
The merits that arise from the community approach are many. First of all the human
knowledge is captured, is enriched with semantics (i.e. tags) and is organized collabo-
ratively (i.e. folksonomies, wikis) in a mechanically readable way. Instead of a multi-
tude of distinct applications that do not cooperate, the community platform is the
World Wide Web, and the community activities and services can be developed using
commonly agreed standards and common terminology. Web offers ubiquitous access
to the community services, since web 2.0 applications are light and can be accessed
by mobiles, PDAs, or even tv-sets. New content (i.e. video blogging or podcasting),
requests for advice, patient related information or input to surveys can be attached us-
ing the same devices (e.g. patient can select their symptoms from a list and communi-
cated them to the community experts).
The personalization of the community content to the specific needs of each mem-
ber can be done by selecting the mini-applications (widgets) that fit each patient's
needs. Smart alert systems can be developed that will remind patients of their sched-
uled treatment or that will inform doctors on their patients health status.
All community transactions and communications must be secure and various ac-
cess levels can be used. Trust inside the community can be guaranteed by a strong
administrator organization through the use of proper technologies, validation mecha-
nisms and security structures. Trust can also be developed by using an evaluation and
reputation system. In this system, expert users will be able to validate content, and all
community members will be able to judge, vote and tag content in order to make it
useful for others.