Coalescing medical systems: a challenge for health informatics in a global world

As globalisation advances, patients in many nations increasingly access diverse medical systems including Western medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy and Ayervedic medicine. The trend toward co-existence of medical systems presents challenges for health informatics including the need to develop standards that can encompass the diversity required, the need to develop software applications that effectively inter-operate across diverse systems and the need to support patients when evaluating competing systems. This article advances the notion that the challenges can most effectively be met with the development of informatics approaches that do not assume the superiority of one medical system over another. Argument visualization to support patient decision making in selecting an appropriate medical system is presented as an application that exemplifies this stance.