Tailoring Medicine and Telemedicine-Period 2

National health systems face great difficulties in providing adequate care for an affordable price. New solutions are being investigated to speed up these processes and to make them more affordable. A promising development is the combined use of hitherto separated sources of information, such as modalities in imaging diagnostics, continuous physiological monitoring, and audio and video monitoring. Each modality presents its own problems, but combined together (multimedia), analysis of all this data can enable fast discoveries in life sciences and lead to novel health care interventions. Another promising field is telemedicine, enabling e.g. the Heart Institute of the Caribbean to build upon the expertise of renowned heart surgeons in Switzerland, at only a marginal cost. Patient empowerment is another major development in health care. Better communication and decision support allow the patient to take responsibility for a part of the care process. These different developments enabled by ICT have an impact on the provision and organization of health care and allow to tailor medicine and health care in general, to the needs of the individual patient.

Incorporating information and communication technology in health care, requires changes in the way of working, new business models and new ways of collaboration. But how do you get these different actors to work together and share their data? How to assist health care professionals in changing over paradigms and business processes? How can we make sure that financial interests do not interfere with patient care? How do we combine all data and ensure privacy? Last, but not least, we discuss the impact of multimedia on communicating scientific findings to different publics. To what extent may the combined use of for example video clips and interactive websites improve the effectiveness of health promotion programs?

In teams of four students, you will study how multimedia applications in health care change expert ? patient/user interaction and communication. To this end you will learn how to use different participatory design methodologies in order to develop ICT applications in health care.

Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.