Beyond wishful thinking; medical community presence on the web and challenges of pervasive healthcare.

Romanian healthcare is facing a number of challenges, from the growing general costs, through requests for better services, inadequate territorial coverage, medical errors and a growing incidence of chronic diseases, to the burden of debt toward the pharmaceutical industry. For the last 14 years decision factors have been searching for the magic formula in restructuring the healthcare sector. Eventually, the government has come to appreciate the benefits of IT solutions. Our paper presents recent advances in wireless technologies and their impact on healthcare, in parallel with the results of a study aimed to acknowledge the presence of the medical community on Romanian WWW and to evaluate the degree of accessibility for the general population. We have documented Web sites promoting health services, discussion forums for patients, online medical advice, medical image teleprocessing, health education, health research and documentation, pharmaceutical products, e-procurement, health portals, medical links, hospitals and other health units present on the Web. Initial results have shown that if the current trend in price decreases for mobile communications continues and if the government is able to provide funding for the communication infrastructure needed for pervasive healthcare systems together with the appropriate regulations and standards, this can be a long-term viable solution of the healthcare crisis.