This rootlessness has persisted. By mid century, executive transfers had become a staple of corporate life, turning the upwardly mobile into a new species of migrant worker. The triumph of the interstate highway system, tract housing, strip development, and the automobile encouraged interchangeable landscapes, with entire "communities" massed-produced as marketable commodities.

Still no one factored in the cost of transience in economic and social terms. But at least researchers like Robert Weiss began to explore the impact of social atomization on loneliness, divorce-rates, and well-being. In observing new ways of organizing daily existence, he noted how "the loss of natural daily social gatherings on the porch, the street, or the corner drugstore made sharing experiences and insulating problems more difficult."(Weiss, 1973, Loneliness. MIT Press). Residents of transient communities lacked not only long-term relationships with friends and neighbors but the benefits of older generations of family members close by.

Mark Fried, Weiss' colleague, referred to the loneliness of working-class residents of Boston's West End as ‘grieving for a lost home' after their neighborhood was razed for what was then called urban renewal. Boston's West End was a community of people rich in attachments, both to the place, and to each other. If you have ever visited Boston's North End, a chaotic jumble which still exists and that seems to operate as an extended family, then you get the idea. Weiss speculated that the "intense personal suffering" of the West Ends' dispossessed would not be "easily alleviated by larger or newer apartments."(Weiss, 1973).

(...)

Solving the Health Research Puzzle

Imagine a virtual marketplace or ecosystem where participants share data, knowledge, materials and services to accelerate research. The components might include databases on the results of chemical assays, toxicity screens, and clinical trials; libraries of drugs and chemical compounds; repositories of biological materials (tissue samples, cell lines, molecules), computational models predicting drug efficacies or side effects, and contract services for high-throughput genomics and proteomics, combinatorial drug screening, animal testing, biostatistics, and more.

We envision a Commons where a researcher will be able to order everything needed to replicate a published experiment as easily as ordering DVDs from Amazon, where where one can create a workflow to exploit replicated results on an industrial scale.

Health Commons’ marketplace will slash the time, cost, and risk of developing treatments for diseases. Individual researchers, institutions, and companies will be able to publish information about their expertise and resources so that others in the community can readily discover and use them. Core competencies, from clinical trial design to molecular profiling, will be packaged as turnkey services and made available over the Net. The Commons will serve as the public-domain, non-profit hub, with third-parties providing value added services that facilitate information access, communication, and collaboration.

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

The Health Commons is too complex for any one organization or company to create. It requires a coalition of partners across the spectrum. It is also too complex for public, private, or non-profit organizations alone - reinventing therapy development for the networked world requires, from the beginning, a commitment to public-private partnership. Only through a public-private partnership can the key infrastructure of the Commons be created: the investments in the public domain of information and materials will only be realized if that public domain is served by a private set of systems integrators and materials, tools and service providers motivated by profit. And in turn, the long-term success of the private sector depends on a growing, robust, and self-replenishing public domain of data, research tools, and open source software.

Read The White Paper »

For some time now we have seen how the ‘new Internet’ is revolutionising the way users communicate and relate to each other. New social networks allow any Internet user to establish a personal or professional relationship with other users or groups anywhere in the world. Platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia and Google offer up new kinds of relationships as well as new challenges.

This new trend is the so-called web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the representation of the advances in traditional applications towards web applications focused on the final user. There is a series of web 2.0 tools (blogs, wiki, RSS, files) that allow any user, without much technical knowledge, to be able to create their own web page.

Since its appearance, web 2.0 has grown exponentially. In March 2007² there were 70 million blogs (doubling in number every 6 months), Wikipedia had more than 2 million articles. Facebook currently has over 150 million users, which would make it the sixth largest country in the world. And it is still early days if we take into account that only 3% of Internet users actually create content.

In parallel, the application of technology in the area of health has been slow compared to other sectors. Although it is certainly true that the drive on the part of health organisations and the benefit obtained is clear, the implementation, starting up of projects and resistance to change are all tough obstacles. Nonetheless, considerable advances have been made in the last few years and the future is hopeful.

Health authorities are betting heavily on the digitisation and implementation of Health Information Systems (HIS), showing clear benefits. Kaiser Permanente (insurance company with 8.6 million patients) has invested 4 billion dollars in its HIS, which has allowed it to lower the average number of visits per patient by 26%. The NHS (UK) is investing 13 billion pounds in a controversial digitisation plan that is starting to bear fruit. A study by the RAND Corporation forecasts that digitisation might save as much as 6% of the 2.6 trillion dollars which are spent annually on healthcare in the USA and foresees that by 2020 90% of hospitals will have been digitised.

(...)

e-oncología es el primer proyecto educacional en e-learning dedicado exclusivamente a la formación en oncología en idioma español. Su objetivo principal es crear espacios virtuales de aprendizaje relacionados con el cáncer tanto para especialistas en formación o en activo como para profesionales no especialistas. Cubre la creciente necesidad y demanda de formación existente tanto en España como en los países de América Latina.