Designing and Managing Advanced, Intelligent and Ethical Health and Social Care Ecosystems

The ongoing transformation of health systems around the world aims at personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine, supported by technology. It considers individual health status, conditions, and genetic and genomic dispositions in personal, social, occupational, environmental and behavioral contexts. In this way, it transforms health and social care from art to science by fully understanding the pathology of diseases and turning health and social care from reactive to proactive. The challenge is the understanding and the formal as well as consistent representation of the world of sciences and practices, i.e., of multidisciplinary and dynamic systems in variable context. This enables mapping between the different disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, intentions, languages, etc., as philosophy or cognitive sciences do. The approach requires the deployment of advanced technologies including autonomous systems and artificial intelligence. This poses important ethical and governance challenges. This paper describes the aforementioned transformation of health and social care ecosystems as well as the related challenges and solutions, resulting in a sophisticated, formal reference architecture. This reference architecture provides a system-theoretical, architecture-centric, ontology-based, policy-driven model and framework for designing and managing intelligent and ethical ecosystems in general and health ecosystems in particular.

Automated summary

The global transformation of health systems aims to achieve personalized, preventive, predictive, participatory precision medicine with the support of technology. It takes into account individual health status, conditions, as well as genetic and genomic dispositions in various contexts. This transformation involves understanding the pathology of diseases, turning health and social care from reactive to proactive, and requires the deployment of advanced technologies including autonomous systems and artificial intelligence. However, it also poses important ethical and governance challenges.