Several people have already written about Forrestor's prediction (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8555) of social networking by 2013. My question is, how widely excepted will these technoligies be in healthcare? Typically, healthcare is the last to adopt new technologies and in some cases is 5-10 years behind other industries. Several technologies that could be implemented that would help healthcare institutions interface with the public and those being:
Podcasts (provide evidence based recommendations by physicians and announcements about upcoming events)
Mashups (provide transparency for hospital quality and safety statistics as compared to the industry)
Blogs (for internal and external use to allow folks to interact with hospital leadership)
I guess we will we see how the next few years play out to see if these and other web 2.0 technologies are adopted by healthcare.
Today CNN Money had the following article on Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0
After reading this article, it was time to read up some more on Web 3.0 by turning to Wikipedia which has a definition by:
Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including: - transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole. JDW - this has already begun when you look at the suite of apps from Google.
- ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices; JDW - this is getting better but there are still a lot of rural and some urban areas where broadband is not available or not affordable.
- network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web servicesdistributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing; interoperability, JDW - most of these services are available today but not widely adopted by large enterprises. These services are ideal solutions for small to medium sized business.
- open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data JDW -
- open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data; JDW - most of these are available today through technologies provided by Google.
- the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores; JDW - all these technologies appear to have a long way to go before they are reality. Several semantic web projects have struggled in taking off but they do offer a promising future for the web.
- distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
- intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents