LEVERAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR COLLABORATION IN CLINICAL TRIALS - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 300

( www.greenhealthcare.ca/ ). The fi rst step toward realizing the concept of green
health care is to develop much more effective and much less harmful treat-
ments. The essential step toward developing safe, effective, and preventative
medicine that keeps people healthy and also keeps the environment healthy
will be effective clinical trials tested over large groups of the population glob-
ally and also over a long period of time. By doing so, the long-term benefi ts
and risks of a treatment will be fully assessed. Green health care spans from
building environmentally friendly homes and offi ces (health care centers),
offering affordable, sustainable, and renewable patient care, to promoting
community and environmental health.
Effective clinical trials to fully assess the long-term benefi ts and risks of a
treatment require multidisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration to
exchange strategies and pioneer ideas by enabling interactive dialogue in real
time among the stakeholders of the trial, including the trial participants. A
multidisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration can be enabled with the
leverage of various technologies which are essential building blocks for social
computing where people can exchange ideas and information in real time in
a trusted virtual space, as discussed earlier in this chapter.
In the near future, as asserted by Baek and Robson [4], “your doctor could
screen you for known diseases, simply by taking a few drops of your blood,
and prescribe the best medication for your condition based on your personal
genotypic and phenotypic profi le.” Doctors, having a variety of safe and effec-
tive treatments readily available, may be able to choose the best treatment for
each patient in consideration of the individual patient's hereditary traits and
environmental and lifestyle variances. Doctors can now provide personalized
holistic patient care by screening treatment options in microfl uidic chips,
predictively simulating the effects and risks of treatment options in virtual
reality in computers, and even synthesizing a combination of treatments in
microlaboratories.
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5. RSS . Available: http://www.rssboard.org/rss - specifi cation .
6. FTC . Available: www.ftc.gov/reports/privacy2000/privacy2000.pdf .
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