Kanav Kahol and Douglas Fridsma awarded research grant

Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) and Banner Health recently provided $442,000 in research funding to Kanav Kahol and Douglas Fridsma to conduct research on a Colorado-based computer network system that supports telemedicine.

The goal of this research project is to enhance collaboration between patients and clinicians to solve complex medical problems and create an informed, connected medical community.

Kahol explains his research by saying, “The overall intent is to develop an informatics backbone that can support the next generation of telemedicine solutions. Currently telemedicine networks do not contain blogs, discussions lists, or any web 2.0 technology that can significantly enhance efficiency and reliability of the network.”

Some examples of 2.0 technologies are Wiki, blogs and recommender systems. The project titled Socially Relevant Knowledge Based Telemedicine will take place between September 2008 and August 2011. Future patients will benefit from this technology as it seeks to improve diagnoses, reduce medical errors and reduce unnecessary repeat medical visits.