Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
As it is the case with all communities, the administrators should be careful to avoid
several dangers. Most of the efforts we mentioned in section 2, are made by individu-
als, or by a single institute or university and are not supported by a big organization or
a medical forum. A centrally co-ordinated effort is necessary for a successful and ef-
fective community. Administration should be performed
in co-operation with compa-
nies and associations. When the community serves for patients or doctors to support
other associates, the advices and information exchanged between individuals should
be validated. Group moderators need monitoring tools in order to proactively coordi-
nate groups, and would be pleased to have collaborative platforms to support their
groups. Validity can be achieved through monitoring, although, it is preferable to re-
place monitoring with an authorization mechanism. Advices, comments or opinions
that are not signed are considered of low quality and consequently invalid. Valid in-
formation and services are issued by authorized community members only and are
always signed.
The diversity of web 2.0 tools can be confusing to the community members, espe-
cially when all novelties are introduced in one step. Changes and new services should
be added slowly and training, facilitation and user feedback are advisable.
Another issue that must be considered in a medical community relates to the
amount and quality of information offered. The flood of information can be confusing
both to patients and doctors and for this reason, information must be filtered and or-
ganized. Since anyone is able to publish information and since it is not always easy to
see the origin of the information, users could be making decisions on the basis of a
source that might not be quality assured. A certification authority is necessary to
guarantee the expertise level of every user, control the quality of the published infor-
mation and build trust among the community members. Even when the information is
of high quality, users are not capable to make their own judgments and need support
from the experts. Other issues relate to the expertise of all members in handling vir-
tual discussions or providing diagnosis remotely. These issues should be considered
in the design phase in order to increase members' participation and improve the qual-
ity of the community services.
5 Conclusions
This paper performed an overview of web 2.0 applications and compared their fea-
tures to traditional web services under the prism of the medical community and its
needs. Current attempts in using web 2.0 applications in favor of the medical commu-
nity are fragmented, so we present a structure that will allow their interconnection.
The community will bring together doctors, nurses and volunteers around patients and
will provide the tools for requesting and providing medical information, advices and
psychological support. Healthcare associations, companies and researchers will be
able to join the community, disseminate their instructions, products and findings re-
spectively and undertake crucial tasks such as the quality control of services and in-
formation. The use of community services will load the community database with
valuable information concerning user feedback, patient needs, treatment suggestions,
patient profiles and medical record history. The stockpiled information can be ana-
lyzed: by the community administrators who want to improve services, by scientists
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