Innovative ICT Platform for Emerging eHealth Services: Towards Overcoming Technical and Social Barriers and Solving Grand Challenges in Medicine

Abstract

The progress in solving grand challenges in eHealth is not as dynamic as the development of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Despite many accomplished achievements in research, systems and solutions available on the market are not comprehensive. There are two main reasons for this: the progress in overcoming existing barriers is insufficient and we will face a social revolution corresponding to the expected development of Future Internet and the transformation into ubiquitous society. The paper presents a possible solution for this situation and is relevant for two important topics: telemedicine/eHealth services and integration between classical medicine and eHealth. We introduce the concept of innovative ICT platform for eHealth services which arose within an advanced Polish eInfrastructure. Accordingly, the paper is focused on well characterized components of this infrastructure, which are already used by different eHealth projects and activities. The set of components include PIONIER Optical Network, GRID computing infrastructure, virtual laboratories, video content distribution system, digital libraries and high definition videoconferencing. These components allow to create an integrated eHealth living laboratory platform which lets users to participate in a new model of interaction where doctors, nurses, patients interact with virtual space and at the same time they use real facilities available in hospitals, which are to be parts of the lab infrastructure. The pilot realization of this concept has begun to enable applications for disease research and treatment organization, virtual laboratory for medical imaging, clinical decision support system, medical teleeducation and teleconsultations. This is the way we propose to break down technical and social barriers and possibly accelerate solving grand challenges in medicine.