Can we overcome the effect of conflicts in rendering palliative care? An introduction to the Middle Eastern Cancer Consortium (MECC).

The Middle East has been experiencing an ongoing political conflict for the past several decades. This situation has been characterized by hostility often leading to violence of all sources. At times, such a conflict led to the outbreak of a military war, which was followed by an enmity between religious, ethnic, cultural, and national populations. In such environmental situations, palliative care professionals often confront major challenges including bias, mistrust, and mutual suspicion between patients and their treating clinicians. In order to overcome such obstacles, while rendering palliative care services, all professionals involved need careful planning and execution of their treatment plans. The latter is however possible, and sometimes successful even across lines of conflict, thereby promoting understanding, mutual respect, and tolerance between the involved communities and individuals.

User perspective of DITIS: virtual collaborative teams for home-healthcare.

DITIS supports home-care by offering wireless health care services for chronic illnesses. The main service is the dynamic creation, management and co-ordination of virtual collaborative healthcare teams for the continuous treatment of the patient at home, independently of the physical location of the team's members (or the patient). For each patient a flexible (dynamic) virtual medical team is provided, made up from visiting home-care nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals, responsible for each case. This virtual team is able to provide dedicated, personalized and private service to the home residing patient on a need based and timely fashion, under the direction of the treating specialist, without the necessity to move the patient from his home, thus making better use of the scarce and expensive medical professionals and scarce hospital beds, irrespective of geographic or organisational barriers. DITIS uses a number of state of the art technologies which are seamlessly put together, such as collaboration and personalization via mobile agents, access to medical data from anywhere and any time via a variety of mobile devices and a variety of protocols (i.e., WAP, HTML) and continuous connectivity via new communication technologies such as ADSL and GPRS, and soon UMTS. All the technologies are selected for platform independence.