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Leveraging Web 3.0 for the Next Generation Universal Health Care

Satyam Priyadarshy
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Satyam Priyadarshy
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are important transforming agents of health care and public health, their power and capabilities are limited to achieving universal health care. A significant proportion of the Internet health information available to consumers is confusing, misleading and often times even in disagreement with the professional recommendations of the health care service providers. Studies indicate that a certain population of patients failed to follow their physicians’ advice, after having performed web searches on the treatments they were recommended. This non-adherence arises due to the following two reasons: (a) the behavioral aspects (anxiety, decline health, etc.) of the patient, and (b) confusion created by fragmented information available via the web. The information itself is published with little co-ordination and co-operation between the various publishers (governmental agencies, non-governmental businesses, and other health care service organizations). The Web 2.0 revolution made it so easy to publish such information that no attention was paid to maintaining checks and balances on the information itself.

Universal health care also needs to account for the rising number of alternative providers of health care service. These providers are chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, therapists, etc. Well, studies show that one in three persons in the U.S. seeks health care services concurrently from alternative providers and primary service providers. The care is, now, fragmented between the regular service providers and the alternative providers. A lack of communication develops into issues of critical importance for the patient, between the two providers. This fragmentation increases the complexity and the cost of treatment.

Web 3.0 and beyond, is poised to provide solutions for above challenges. Web 3.0 has many different meanings; but basically describes the evolution of the web usage and interaction among several paths. It transforms the web into a large database, makes content accessible through diverse devices and leverages the artificial intelligence, or the Semantic Web.

Heath care information is one of the prime candidates for leveraging Web 3.0 based on the issues discussed above. Web 3.0 technologies can enable a sustainable, efficient and reliable healthcare ecosystem. The health care ecosystem (HC Ecosystem) consists of the following: healthcare professionals, institutions that provide a range of clinical and non-clinical supporting services to the patients. The HC Ecosystem will flourish well, if the following topics are addressed well.

Health care systems collect large amounts of data, distributed across many applications and data stores. Health systems are upgraded as technology changes, however, the migration of legacy data remains a challenge. The standards for data transfer, sharing and communication between distributed sites are not well defined. There is an attempt to use HL7 data sharing standards for heath care data and web services.


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