[Journal Article] The Emergent Discipline of Health Web Science -with related links and articles

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Came across this article through an online professional health community.  It describes how the Internet is changing approaches to healthcare issues.  Current evidence shows Web sites can empower professional and lay alike through informational Web pages, social media, health record annotations and linkages for exploration and analysis. However, these applications can be built on to better serve the health care related needs of all.  The Web can be better” engineered for health research, clinical research, and clinical practice. In addition, it is desirable to support consumers who utilize the Web for gathering information about health and well-being and to elucidate approaches to providing social support to both patients and caregivers. Finally, there is the motivation to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of health care.” The paper goes on to outline channelling further efforts in these areas.

• Social networks
• Patient Engagement Through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing
• Sensors, Smart Technology and Expert Patients
• “Big Data”, Semantic, and Other Integration Technologies
• Rapid, Automated, Contextualized Knowledge Discovery and Application

From the full text of the article

Abstract

The transformative power of the Internet on all aspects of daily life, including health care, has been widely recognized both in the scientific literature and in public discourse. Viewed through the various lenses of diverse academic disciplines, these transformations reveal opportunities realized, the promise of future advances, and even potential problems created by the penetration of the World Wide Web for both individuals and for society at large. Discussions about the clinical and health research implications of the widespread adoption of information technologies, including the Internet, have been subsumed under the disciplinary label of Medicine 2.0. More recently, however, multi-disciplinary research has emerged that is focused on the achievement and promise of the Web itself, as it relates to healthcare issues. In this paper, we explore and interrogate the contributions of the burgeoning field of Web Science in relation to health maintenance, health care, and health policy. From this, we introduce Health Web Science as a subdiscipline of Web Science, distinct from but overlapping with Medicine 2.0. This paper builds on the presentations and subsequent interdisciplinary dialogue that developed among Web-oriented investigators present at the 2012 Medicine 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Read the entire article here

Related links

• Health Web Science Lab – “A Hippocratic Revolution in Medicine”

The Health WebScience Lab is a multi-disciplinary research initiative between Moray College UHI, NHS Grampian, HIE OpenFinder and Sitekit Solutions Ltd based in the Highlands of Scotland committed to improving health locally, nationally and internationally.

This initiative will lead, connect and collaborate on research in the emerging discipline of WebScience and Healthcare to create communities which take responsibility for their own wellbeing and self-care. This will be achieved through the application of information and other communication technologies via the internet across a whole range of functions that affect health care thereby stimulating novel research between health care professionals, the community at large and industry.

• Health Web Science Twitter account

studies ” the effects of the interaction of healthcare with the web, and of the web with healthcare” and how one can be effectively harnessed to change the other

• 3rd International Conference on Web Science (Program with many links to presentations)

Related articles

• Participatory Medicine 2.0 (projecthealthdesign.typepad.com)
• HealthCamp Boston 2012: Brainstorming the Future of Health Care (healthblawg.typepad.com)
• Semantic Web (pantypeblog.wordpress.com)
• Cooperation in Health: Mapping Collaborative Networks on the Web (plosone.org)
• Text Analytics and Semantic Processing Fuel New Web Paradigm (arnoldit.com)
• What is WebScience? (mymindbursts.com)
• Medicine 2.0’13: 6th World Congress on Social Media, Mobile Apps and Web 2.0 in Health, Medicine, and Biomedical Research (walterfarah.net)