Dani Iswara .Net

Web 2.0, the Future of Medicine and Healthcare

Medicine 2.0, a collaboration of Web 2.0 + medicine, will be the future of medicine and healthcare. Internationally and academically, the term of Medicine 2.0 has a wider concept.

Probably fewer clinicians will know about Web 2.0 concept. At least they have used medical / health-related blogs, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), wikis, podcasts, mail list, forum or other Internet-based media as a second life (virtual environment).

Internet technologies have a new way to collaborate mass user via interactive applications and virtual social networking. Users can create, manage and share their content using open web standard, friendly user interface / web browser.

Medical community, patients, physicians, technicians are important subject of these Medicine 2.0 technologies. They can provide ubiquitous (any time, any place, any device) medical / health-related information.

From the theme of Medicine 2.0 Congress 2008, Medicine 2.0 will strive for an interdisciplinary (health care, computer sciences, social sciences, business, engineering) including researcher, practitioner and business experts.

Topics of the congress are:

• Blogs
• Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals
• Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers
• Business models in a Web 2.0 environment
• Collaborative biomedical research, academic / scholarly communication, publishing and peer review
• Consumer empowerment, patient-physician relationship and sociotechnical issues
• Ethical & legal issues, confidentiality and privacy
• Health information on the web: supply and demand
• Innovative RSS / XML applications
• Personal health records and patient portals
• Public e-health, population health technologies, surveillance
• Search, collaborative filtering and recommended technologies
• Semantic Web (”Web 3.0″) applications
• The nature and dynamics of social networks in health
• Usability and human factors on the web
• Virtual (3D) environments, Second Life
• Web 2.0 approaches for behaviour change, public health and biosurveillance
• Web 2.0 approaches for clinical practice, clinical research, quality monitoring
• Web 2.0-based medical education and learning
• Wikis
• Youth and Digital Learning
• other

Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH (see complete profile on his old homepage) mentioned the keywords of Medicine 2.0 (see graphic) are:

1. Social Networking,
2. Participation,
3. Apomediation,
4. Collaboration, and
5. Openness

Off course, evaluation and research are still needed to establish best practice. How Medicine 2.0 boost medical teaching and learning productivity. How Medicine 2.0 support continuing medical education / professional development (CME / CPD) and patient education.

Medical practitioners and medical educators cannot afford to ignore these future of medicine and healthcare [?].

Also read Medicine 2.0 special page from Bertalan Mesko and Medicine 2.0 from Huda Toriq (Indonesian).