Practising cloud-based telemedicine in developing countries.

In industrialised countries, telemedicine has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling access to knowledge and allowing information exchange, and showing that it is possible to provide good quality of healthcare to isolated communities. However, there are many barriers to the widespread implementation of telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. These include deficient internet connectivity and sophisticated peripheral medical devices. Furthermore, developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. In this paper, we report our work on developing a cloud-based health information system, which promotes telemedicine and patient-centred healthcare by exploiting modern information and communication technologies such as OWL-ontologies and SQL-triggers. The reason for using cloud technology is twofold. First, cloud service models are easily adaptable for sharing patients health information, which is of prime importance in patient-centred healthcare as well as in telemedicine. Second, the cloud and the consulting physicians may locate anywhere in the internet.

Personal Health Ontology: towards the interoperation of e-health tools.

Patient-centred healthcare subscribes to the belief that the patient has strengths, values and experiences that are important in the healthcare experience and relationship between those providing care and the patient. It requires patients to have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. The main problem here is that though the e-health applications provide patients and consumer with access to health information, each application is still individually used and the used and produced information remains within each system. In this paper, we present our work on developing a Personal Health Server, which allows the interoperation of e-health tools through the shared ontology. The ontology is developed by integrating the ontologies of the e-health tools, which support personal health records, e-health oriented blogs and information therapy. Technically the Personal Health Server is based on knowledge management technologies, and it is easily extensible to capture additional e-health tools.

The role of medicinal ontologies in querying and exchanging pharmaceutical information.

The technology developed for interoperable autonomous systems has significantly changed during the past few years. In particular, XML is rapidly becoming the key standard for data representation and transportation. However, the introduction of XML is not enough but many other XML-based technologies have to be deployed in order to achieve a seamless interoperability between the organisations of the healthcare sector. In this article we have restricted ourselves on electronic prescription systems and on the chances that Semantic Web technologies can provide. In particular, we report our work on medicinal ontologies and how they can be exploited (i) in providing querying facilities on electronic prescriptions and (ii) in achieving semantic interoperability between medicinal information systems. Especially, we introduced our adopted RDF-based messaging and show its gains over XML-based messaging.