Multimodal Social Networking for Healthcare Professionals

In this paper a study on Social Networking for healthcare professionals has been carried out. Starting from the results obtained by the study, the paper proposes an innovative Social Networking platform for healthcare professionals for facilitating access and sharing of health care services. The platform allows to use multimodal interaction and multimodal information by involving technologies such as Skype, developed for communication, and in particular for tele-communication. To implement the platform some interviews have been carried out in order to understand the characteristics and services that it has to offer to be efficient. The interviews have been contributed to understand the use that physicians make of Social Networks and the advantages and disadvantages they offer to them. The platform that we are proposing provides physicians a greater opportunity of communication and collaboration. In a virtual space physicians can aggregate observations from their daily practice and then exchange each others´ opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications and treatments.