Modeling for effective collaboration in telemedicine

Telemedicine is a remote medical practice, which utilizes advanced telecommunications and information technologies for the delivery of healthcare and the exchange of heath information across distances. The development of telemedicine has significantly changed the medical collaborative decision making and doctor-patient relationships and has an impact on the responsibilities of physicians to patients and how to treat them. Moreover, in the chain of medical care information exchanged between a requesting physician and medical expert should assist in decision making. In this regard, we propose means for the formalization of exchanges, which is very important because it facilitates a transparent and traceable understanding of the remote process. So, we engage knowledge-based modeling for supporting collaborative activities in telemedicine. This includes the engagement of formal ontologies to ensure structuration of terminology and identification across all entities in a domain so that multiple sources of data can be aggregated through comparable reference terms. The provided benefit is the generated support for logic-based intelligent applications that are able to perform complex reasoning tasks such as checking for errors and inconsistencies and deriving logical inferences. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.