GECOSAN: a platform of tools and services for health knowledge management

Knowledge management in the medical domain has been recognized as a critical issue in development of medical systems in all western countries. The increasing demand for health services is now facing the problematic aspect of delivering, organizing and saving resources in clinical contexts. An Italian research project, titled GECOSAN, is currently being developed in order to realize a digital environment aimed both at helping in the dissemination of world wide clinical knowledge to medical practitioners and at collecting feedback by the same practitioners so that to increase the knowledge base. The project focuses on the development and deployment of a SW platform based on the standards of “Web Services” so that to ensure full interoperability. This is then exploited to provide two basic services beyond any barrier of HW and SW diversity. The first service consists of making widely available, to medical practitioners, operational guidelines stemming from all known and scientifically approved clinical trials that make up the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). The second service aims at supporting the efforts of Continuing Medical Education with events that are provided over the Web through the novel “Intelligent Tutoring System” technology, in order to eliminate the weaknesses of distance learning.