The “Second Opinion Medical Network”

Abstract

The "Second Opinion Medical Network" is a consultation referral web and medical office system recruiting a wide panel of real-time available specialists, to whom any patient affected by any disease or syndrome and not satisfied with the diagnosis or therapy can apply for an individual clinical audit. Due to the physician-patient communication gap, most of the patients usually wander around the medical websites looking for proper answers to their health problems. However, this search often becomes compulsive and obsessive and frequently ambiguous and frustrating. Palmieri, et al. defines this borderline or even pathological behavior as the "Web Babel Syndrome"-psychological imbalance affecting young and elderly patients, often with multiple synchronous diseases receiving by their care givers heterogeneous and misleading informations or advices, as well as, confused, contradictory statements and prescriptions. To deal with this problem, the "Second Opinion Medical Network" aims to be a useful "problem-solving" support revisiting each conflictual diagnostic and therapeutic step and properly re-addressing tailored treatments and prognoses, preventing unnecessary investigations and unhelpful and expensive medical and surgical interventions.The aim of this editorial is to describe the role and benefits of such a medical network in our web connected health care system. KeywordsSecond opinion, Network, Surgery, Cancer, EconomyIn 2002, a survey of 4,530 people in Europe and USA showed that 32% of Europeans and 43% of Americans preferred to use health web sites, sponsored by BBC and Yahoo, for health information [3]. However, the internet sites are often lacking of adequate information concerning disease complications and aftercare [4]. This web-searching behaviour is often continuous, compulsory, somehow obsessive, leading to the "Web Babel Syndrome", defined as a physician-patient communication gap frequently occurring when the patient affected by multiple synchronous pathologies, feeds back heterogeneous and misleading informations and prescriptions with the risk to drop in a confusionary state [5][6][7][8].In 1999, the Institute of Medicine report cited fatal medical errors in some 40,000-98,000 Americans PER year [8] supporting once more the concept that a further consultation or specialistic second opinion may be useful antidote to lethal misdiagnosis [9].The term "second opinion" has been widely reported also in histology [10,11] and pathology (e.g. thyroid pathology) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] where the diagnosis is often difficult, misunderstood and strongly based on the healthcare professionals' experience. It has been defined as a qualified, interdisciplinary medical opinion, based on medical evidence, of an experienced medical specialist or a team [21]. An effective and helpful second opinion strategy in various pathologies (e.g. oral pathology) is the use of smartphones and software applications, such as WhatsApp Messenger, a crossplatform mobile messaging application that allows the exchang...