All entries for Thursday 01 February 2007

February 01, 2007

What is MediiGate

Writing about web page http://www.mediigate.com/Medigate/DesktopDefault.aspx?ItemID=867&tabindex=7&tabid=696

Business efficiency is often gained by getting the customer to do more of the work. eg. Supermarkets. The internet and particularly Portal Technology is playing a key role in enabling this efficiency. MediiGate research will look at the Portal, and associated infrastructure for self help medical treatment. Unfortunately in the UK the current medical establishment is poorly structured for this type of application. Thus we want to explore this question using structures, needs and systems in place for medical tourism.

Recent government changes are increasingly focusing on customer driven choice, eg. Consultants have to identify a list of potential places for treatment and the patient can choose for different procedures. Thus the situation is increasingly likely to become more like an open marketplace with the customer choosing from this marketplace. Recent discussions with regional NHS trust management have confirmed this need. We will examine the needs from and the procedures used by The Taj Medical Group, the leading provider of medical tourism to India.

The research will identify and evaluate the procedures used by self help patients, the tools available or necessary to aid them, and how these services can be integrated in a commercially viable way using portal technology. The portal we would start from is the advanced portal developed for the Engineering industry by the WMCCM project. There are many complex research issues embedded in the tasks identified. Understanding capacity, and methods to optimise its usage (capacity options trading?). Advanced planning for multi procedure patients, Aftercare (Life cycle management?), Natural Language inference for interpreting patient needs.

Ideally, MediiGate will be a model that can increasingly be adopted by the UK as the planned/expected changes are implemented and the system moves to a more open free market model similar to the medical tourism model.

: 01 Feb 2007 15:00 | Tags: Medical Mediigate Research Tourism | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem