The Web and the New Generation of Medical Information Systems

The advent of the Internet has allowed physicians, patients and other healthcare providers to access an unprecedented volume of information in an easy and cost-effective way. However, despite the perspectives that information systems offer to healthcare professionals, their implementation is not easy. In fact, there are many difficult problems to overcome in the design of medical information systems for efficient knowledge extraction. The huge amount of information on patients accumulated in modern healthcare institutions is difficult to manage and often not as useful as it should be, because it is either inaccessible, too slow to be clinically used, or too difficult to access, thereby justifying the need for more effective information management techniques and statistical analysis for knowledge discovery and extraction. The privacy of information required both for legal and ethical issues, and the quality and reliability of information are also important issues in this kind of systems. Also, in many real-world situations, information is still kept on paper due to the unavailability of adequate computer support or to the traditional technophobia of many users, pushing the need for better, more appealing, and user-friendly human interfaces. In this chapter, an overview of the state-of-the-art intelligent medical information systems has been presented, the main problems in their development have been identified, and the currently adopted solutions have been discussed. New trends in the next generation medical information systems have also been pointed out. The expected influence of the new generation intelligent medical information systems on cancer prediction, diagnosis and treatment is envisaged and related difficulties are identified.