Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

A Toy Story - Patrick Baudisch's projects

Some people definitely have jobs that are more fun than mine. Take a look at Patrick Baudisch's projects and you'll see what I mean - his job is probably more fun than yours is too. Patrick works for Microsoft Research, one of the great sources of innovative ideas, even if its parent organization is the Borg. Whatever. This post is about toys, not commerce or politics.

I got turned on to his work through a recent article in IEEE Computer that I finally got to read over lunch today. The article was called Interacting With Large Displays, and it describes some of his work regarding the pains that accompany the joy of having a wall-size display "monitor" for your computer. His solutions for these problems are truly fascinating.

eWeek: Digital Health Coming to Grandma's House

eWeek has an article that just came out entitled Digital Health Coming to Grandma's House. It paints a potentially rosy picture of a future in which health IT reaches into people's homes to propagate preventive care and facilitate remote intervention when necessary. There is, however, an 800-pound fly in the ointment: America's fragmented, bloated, overpriced and underserving healthcare system. Providers and payers face a Prisoner's Dilemma problem that isn't going to go away anytime soon.

More on the Linux Wearable Computer

(Click to enlarge)

Yesterday I put up a quickie about a post in The Positive Technology Journal regarding a wearable Linux computer targeted at the healthcare market. I took a look last night at the Web page describing this new toy, the Zypad WL 1000 from Parvus Corporation. I have mixed feelings about it - I love new gadgets as much as anyone, am enjoying learning to hack Linux, but feel like this may be a bit ahead of its time, at least in the healthcare market.

A History of the future...

Looking through my SiteMeter stats yesterday, I noticed several links to an earlier post entitled Resident Physician, 2010, which was a scenario-planning-like look at how technology will change the healthcare environment. The referring address was a blog post entitled Blogging NI2006. The 9th International Congress on Nursing Informatics. Seoul, Korea June 2006 - A History of the future. It turns out someone used material from my post in a presentation there. Woo-hoo!

As I read the post and the comments, though, I felt a bit of trepidation, a fear we may be over-estimating what our silicon toys can do.  I'm really excited about how technology is going to change healthcare, but I think we need to be very careful about the dangers of reducing the human element. I have a great example of why I feel this way.

EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Models with Alternative Vocabularies

I often look to the EDS Fellows' Next Big Thing Blog for ideas about the future of technology. Although a bit more uneven and cursory than some of the quality blogs by mavens at Microsoft and IBM, the EDS Fellows can be counted on to be at or near the cutting edge of the IT world. A recent entry entitled EDS' Next Big Thing Blog : Models with Alternative Vocabularies is a great example, and one with tremendous practical implications for those of us in health IT and clinical research informatics.

[UPDATED] Driving in Traffic: Blogs in the Health-O-Sphere

The Driving in Traffic blog had a great post last week about the role of Blogs in the Health-O-Sphere.  It asks whether (and how) evidence-based medicine and Web 2.0 technologies can improve the quality of healthcare provided by health organizations. That strikes close to home, being a major part of the research work to which my work contributes, so I have some tentative answers to the questions she raises.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Fard Johnmar's excellent report on healthcare blogging called The Emerging Healthcare Blogosphere: What Is It & Why Does It Matter?.  It costs a few bucks, and by 'few' I mean both very affordable and way too little to compensate for the effort manifested this labor of love. Check it out. Be enlightened on a very important subject.

Driving In Traffic - Blogs as Patient Education

A trackback led me to an inspirational post in the Driving In Traffic blog called Blogs as Patient Education.  It's a great justification of the cost and effort involved in getting started blogging - in the crass world of commerce her position would be called a "business case" for blogging by healthcare professionals.

UPDATED: Towards 2020 Science

UPDATE 3/31/06: A colleague pointed out to me that this site reports the same research described in the Nature Web Focus site I mentioned in my earlier post entitled Quickie: 2020 Vision @ nature.com. I haven't delved into either enough to know if I'm being redundant here - apologies if I am. I only have a life where I can read at leisure on the weekends, and both items are in the queue, both of things to read and things about which I hope to say something intelligent sometime in the future.

Many of the blogs that popped up today on one of my trolling searches (Dr. Web's Domain and Psychology and the Singularity, to name a couple) are bombarding me with pointers to Microsoft Research's new site called  2020 Science that encapsulates the results of their "Towards 2020 Science" effort. The description in the opening page's meta tag is this:

2020 Science sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements for technology to accelerate a decade of scientific advances, particularly those driven by computational sciences and the new kinds of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

I have just begun to delve into this, but it seems to be the deep-ocean equivalent of the little frog-pond in which I have been immersed, trying to get my colleagues focused on taking the future potentialities seriously.

Quickie: 2020 Vision @ Nature.com

A colleague just pointed out to me that Nature has a special focus section in its current issue entitled "2020 Vision" which appears to have a lot of articles of interest with respect to health IT, in particular the future of health IT. Check it out at http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/futurecomputing/index.html.

Healthcare Input: mission impossible? Possible solutions

I was just about to write a post reviewing my Nokia 770 as an input device for study coordinators and investigators in clinical research, when I noticed a post in Colin Jervis' Future Health IT blog entitled Healthcare Input: mission impossible?. Colin sums up nicely some of the negative things I was about to write, including one or two that hadn't occurred to me. Ultimately, to my surprise, it made me more optimistic about devices like the Nokia 770 than I had been before I read his article.