Information and Communication Technologies  in Medicine

Amer Awadh Al-Rawas

Executive Vice-president, Omantel Telecommunications Company, Sultanate of Oman

The introduction of high-speed computers over two decades ago contributed significantly to the effective management of medical care services as well as other medical resources. The ever-growing wealth of knowledge in general and the phenomenal growth of medical knowledge in particular has introduced many challenges in terms of knowledge management and effective distribution to all stakeholders in the medical domain. In particular this has introduced major transformations to medical education methodologies and extended its effect to all aspects of lifelong learning in the medical field. The recent development in Information & Communications Technology (ICT) provided innovative tools and applications for knowledge acquisition, organization, distribution and validation.  Telemedicine uses ICT to provide and support healthcare irrespective of the distance among the participants. It also enables the process of medical service to emerge as a networked series of healthcare and medical learning through an appropriate and effective use of ICT. Considering the availability of broadband networks in the GCC region, large volumes of information relating to medical science and associated expertise can potentially be accessed at the click of a button. However, with the complexity of the relation between the growing wealth of medical knowledge and the increasing integration of the medical care equipment and tools, the need to manage such complexities becomes a formidable challenge. Therefore, recent research directions have focused on knowledge management and integration of large medical informatics systems with e-learning environments. Such efforts aim at developing intelligent pedagogical content management tools that allow the personalization of content depending on the learner segmentation. While such tools are useful in many disciplines they are particularly useful for the medical domain which is characterized by the diversity of specializations and learning tracks. The link between modern medical care systems and modern e-learning systems will allow the learners to benefit from the growing wealth of knowledge available from medical informatics databases. In turn, medical professionals will also be able to reference these large databases as part of their medical care process.

In my presentation I aim to introduce the role of ICT in medical science and highlight the opportunities it offers our region. I will also outline the challenges and pitfalls that we have to watch for as we embrace such technologies.