Objectives:
In a scenario where the Healthcare industry tends to rapid decentralization, with multiple actors involved in the care delivery processes, the importance for professionals to collaborate, access and share data and knowledge becomes more and more stringent.
The aim Doc@Hand is to support Healthcare professionals in this changing environment, by providing a set of IT tools that help reducing the time and associated costs to collect the information and knowledge required, and, more crucially, in making the best use of it for a more informed decision making (diagnoses, therapies, protocols).

Results:
Doc@Hand intends thus to develop, test and validate an application that

• allows transparent access to heterogeneous and geographically dispersed databases owned by separate, but cooperating organizations;
• proactively search – primarily using push technologies as opposed to traditional “pull” approach - for relevant information without the need for the user to perform an explicit query, based on domain ontology as well as static and dynamic information about the user profile and current activities;
• provides the user with representation tools and intuitive interfaces to easily filter and navigate through the information;
• integrates existing decision support systems, and is also able to extract knowledge from unstructured and semi-structured documents;
• incorporates all the above in a cooperative environment that allows virtual communities to be created for exchanging opinions around patients or scientific issues

The integrated environment developed will be accessible from portable platforms such as tablet PCs to support the increasing mobility of Healthcare professionals, and will be validated by major clinical institutions for full adherence to standards and regulations
for security and sensitive data handling.