Using collective intelligence to fine-tune public health policy

The European Union Future Internet Assembly, the roadmap for the Web heading towards semantic interoperabilityand building on the UK's adoption of the Internet and social media are accelerating the development of Web 3.0. A number of health portals are opening, some with facilities for the capture of Patient Based Records. Collective Intelligence will be generated that, applied to health, has potential to support Public Health policy. By using the Internet, millions of people in the course of their daily activities contribute to uncertified data stores, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge bases, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and actions. An application of soft computing, called Collective Health Intelligence, that reasons uncertified and certified data could enhance the social pool of existing health knowledge available to the public health agencies. Collective Health Intelligence could be used to complement national programmes by employing innovative sampling techniques, cost-effectively generating anonymous data trends that would quantify policy, indicate epidemiological effects and supply metrics to test policy efficacy.