Collaborative virtual working environments for medical expertise sharing

In several professional and highly specialized contexts there is an increasing need to share, combine and exploit what is deemed "expertise", that is knowledge, methods, approaches and theories, but also studies, discoveries and so on. In a high technological and frenetic society, the common dissemination channels are not anymore sufficient, while innovative Collaborative Work Environments (CWEs) able to provide advanced supporting services for the everyday activity of professionals become essential. The medical domain is particularly starving of "knowledge sharing". Our experience, in fact, revealed that the research initiatives in the healthcare context are mainly focused on "data" instead of "knowledge", i.e. on designing suitable databases of profiles and procedures, as well as defining precise standards and protocols, with the goal to provide interoperability and seamless interaction among the actors operating in this environment. However, there is the increasing necessity of innovative solutions based on the concept Virtual Working Environments (VWE) where distributed, heterogeneous and complementary resources and know-how can be shared and combined with the goal to offer added-value services to the end-users [1-3]. Objective: Medical services should allow, on one side, the patients to be actors of a "Virtual Hospital" accessible everywhere and anywhere to get and provide information, and, on the other side, the domain professionals and decision makers to count on a distributed and reliable platform of services to support their daily activity and the diagnostic processes.