Identifying the Emerging e-Health Technologies To Ubiquity 2.0 and Beyond
Achieving improvements and optimum healthcare delivery has become a bipartisan top priority for several governments and institutions. The ability to meet this goal depends on the exchange of information within and across healthcare communities. The real challenge for any healthcare initiative is at the application level, where patient data may be stored on hundreds of different clinical systems such as lab, radiology, or pharmacy systems, and various clinical applications such as electronic medical record (EHRs), that use different protocols and schemas. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, many organizations have used enterprise-oriented integration platforms to transform and translate information so that disparate systems could exchange information internally and externally. However, the development and ongoing maintenance of such healthcare systems has become extremely expensive due to the growing complexity of healthcare organizations as they acquire more systems to meet clinical and business needs. As a result, healthcare communities continue to face the same challenge: how to achieve a level of interoperability for accessing all relevant information about a patient from a single point, which is universally becoming the Web, as well as to ensure accuracy, security, and privacy of all the relevant data. This chapter provides a roadmap solution based on the emerging web technologies that hold great promise for addressing these challenges. The roadmap is termed as the “ubiquity 2.0 trend.” This chapter also highlights the security challenges and the emerging web-oriented identity management technologies to provide a single, common user credential that is trusted, secure, and widely supported across the Web and within the healthcare enterprises.