Knowledge engineering for health: A new discipline required to bridge the ‘ICT Gap’ between research and healthcare:
Abstract
Despite vast amounts of money and research being channelled towards biomedical research, relatively little impact has been made on routine clinical practice.
At the heart of this failure is the information and communication technology (ICT) 'chasm' that exists between research and healthcare. A new domain of 'knowledge engineering for health' is needed to facilitate knowledge transmission across the research-healthcare gap. This discipline is required to engineer the bi-directional flow of data: research data and knowledge processed to identify clinically relevant advances and delivered into healthcare use; conversely, outcomes from the practice of medicine made suitably available for use by the research community. This system will be able to self-optimise, in that outcomes for patients treated by decisions that were based on the latest research knowledge will be fed back to the research world. A series of meetings, culminating in the 'I-Health 2011' workshop, have brought together interdisciplinary experts to map the challenges and requirements for such as system. Here we describe the main conclusions from these meetings.
An 'I4Health' interdisciplinary network of experts now exists to promote the key aims and objectives, namely “integrating and interpreting information for individualised healthcare”, by developing the 'knowledge engineering for health' domain.
At the heart of this failure is the information and communication technology (ICT) 'chasm' that exists between research and healthcare. A new domain of 'knowledge engineering for health' is needed to facilitate knowledge transmission across the research-healthcare gap. This discipline is required to engineer the bi-directional flow of data: research data and knowledge processed to identify clinically relevant advances and delivered into healthcare use; conversely, outcomes from the practice of medicine made suitably available for use by the research community. This system will be able to self-optimise, in that outcomes for patients treated by decisions that were based on the latest research knowledge will be fed back to the research world. A series of meetings, culminating in the 'I-Health 2011' workshop, have brought together interdisciplinary experts to map the challenges and requirements for such as system. Here we describe the main conclusions from these meetings.
An 'I4Health' interdisciplinary network of experts now exists to promote the key aims and objectives, namely “integrating and interpreting information for individualised healthcare”, by developing the 'knowledge engineering for health' domain.
