Summary
Web 3.0 promises us smart computer services that will interact with each other and
leverage knowledge about us and our immediate context to deliver prioritised and relevant
information to support decisions and actions. Healthcare must take advantage of such
new knowledge-integrating services, in particular to support better cooperation between
professionals of different disciplines working in different locations, and to enable
well-informed co-operation between clinicians and patients. To grasp the potential
of Web 3.0 we will need well-harmonised semantic resources that can richly connect
virtual teams and link their strategies to real-time and tailored evidence. Facts,
decision logic, care pathway steps, alerts, education need to be embedded within components
that can interact with multiple EHR systems and services consistently. Using Health
Informatics 3.0 a patient’s current situation could be compared with the outcomes
of very similar patients (from across millions) to deliver personalised care recommendations.
The integration of EHRs with biomedical sciences (‘omics) research results and predictive
models such as the Virtual Physiological Human could help speed up the translation
of new knowledge into clinical practice. The mission, and challenge, for Health Informatics
3.0 is to enable healthy citizens, patients and professionals to collaborate within
a knowledge-empowered social network in which patient specific information and personalised
real-time evidence are seamlessly interwoven.
Keywords
Semantic web - semantic interoperability - patient engagement - personalised medicine
- trusted services
