Mind the gap

Patients and physicians often face a serious obstacle in communication because of a cultural and linguistic gap. ldquoMy Heart / il Mio Cuorerdquo is an easy multimedia communication tool for patients which presents the ldquoobscurerdquo language of the cardiological discharge report as an intelligible message. Patients can interactively access and explore, in a plain but still scientifically correct manner, the nature and mechanisms of their own heart disease; look at a 3D, dynamic, virtual picture of the diseased heart; access to the instrumental findings and the clinical processes leading to the diagnosis and to the therapeutic medical decision. The project, winner of the ldquoInternetional Pirelli Awardrdquo as the best product of multimedia communication in life sciences, forwards the idea of implementing medical informative systems based on integrating communicational tools to interface all the actors of the health system, starting from the patient.