WSH 2012 - SECOND WEB SCIENCE HEALTH WORKSHOP

Health Web Science studies the web (and technologies that use the internet) and their emergent properties and how these can benefit society in the area of human health. This workshop aims to investigate the application of the discipline of Web Science to the areas of Health research, education, empowerment, and care.

While technological change is mostly incremental, revolutionary changes inevitably emerge in life critical application domains such as healthcare. Next generation delivery of healthcare will leverage the World Wide Web and will depend on a spectrum of services beyond the traditional scope of the healthcare system, impacting both inpatients, outpatients, and the general public. Reduction of health costs and improvements in health outcomes will be driven by technological innovation across a number of areas, technological, social policy, and governance. Adoption of contemporary interoperability standards in healthcare and embedded communication channels will result in new publishing paradigms with the power to revolutionize healthcare through; ubiquitous information access, interoperability, translation of knowledge and targeted delivery of actionable health information, digital services, social (next of kin) support networks. In parallel, users of the web will drive adoption of and co-create health web services such that individuals and communities become more responsible for their own health.

Currently the existing brand Medicine 2.0 encompasses Web 2.0 applications in health, medicine, and biomedical research but is too broad in scope and constituent disciplines tend not to approach this area of study from the engineering and synthesis of the web, a niche that the emerging discipline of Health Web Science occupies. Health Web Science studies the web (and technologies that use the internet) and their emergent properties and how these can benefit society in the area of human health. Furthermore, the discipline describes, understands and provides theories of structures of how humans (health professionals, patients, communities) co-create and engage with the emergent health ecosystem within which they live. This workshop will continue to lay the foundation of this emerging discipline and build on the success of the workshop of 2011. It will develop the community of workers in this field and and provide a platform for collaboration.

Workshop Themes:

Personalization of Health Applications and data input via the web.
Engaging individuals and communities in services in use on the web.
Health Web Services and Semantics.
Techniques for measuring healthcare quality.
Future directions of Health services using the Web from an engineering and synthesis perspective.
Health Web Applications
Health Web Challenges