Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

Upgrade Your Baby

I'm swamped at work, so I only have a few minutes while I drink my midmorning coffee, but this was too good to pass up. eWeek's daily healthcare newsletter yesterday included a link to an article on VeriChip's Baby Protection System, from which I drew the following teaser text:

VeriChip's infant protection system is really two separate above-the-skin solutions, one a band similar to a standard hospital bracelet that has an embedded RFID chip. The second option, called the Halo skin-sensing system, is similar to an electronic key fob for a car that can be attached to an infant's ankle or a patient's wrist. Another key fob-type device can be worn around the neck of staff members to use as a personal panic button.

Now you can deterministically identify your toddlers among all those others in the daycare center that look just like him or her. One more problem solved for the busy moms and dads out there.

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.

OFF-TOPIC: Why the Silence?

It has been a hectic couple of weeks as the semester at the School of Information wrapped up. I took a great class in applications of network theory and will be writing about that quite a bit as time goes by. The professor, Lada Adamic, is a first-year prof here and she is clearly an amazing catch for the school.

I have taken something of a hiatus from blogging during this period due both to the academic workload and the recent return to our household of my 21-year-old daughter and her 10-month old son, who is without a doubt the cutest baby ever. They have been in northern Peru where MIchelle has been teaching and doing social change work for much of the last two years.

As a result of these wonderful distractions, I have a accrued a lengthy backlog of topics I wanted to cover and blog entries to which I wanted to respond. I will either be posting a lot during the next couple weeks, or not at all due to seizing up with indecision over what to attack first.

We'll have to wait and see which way it goes.

Texting article in Economist.com

I found a great article in the latest Economist issue (3/30), unfortunately only available online to subscribers at the URL Texting | Hot to trot | Economist.com. You can read more about it at this URL for free: http://www.w2forum.com/item/hotxt_launching_free_sms_uk.  The buzz: a new service called Hotxt is trying to be the Skype of text messaging, taking advantage of Java-enabled phones.

Users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, just as they would a game or a ringtone. They choose a user name, and can then exchange as many messages as they like with other Hotxt users for ?1 ($1.75) per week. The messages are sent as data packets across the internet, rather than being routed through operators' text-messaging infrastructure. As a result, users pay only a tiny data-transport charge, typically of a penny or so per message. Since text messages typically cost 10p, this is a big saving—particularly for the cost-conscious teenagers at whom the service is aimed.

Another way to reduce the cost of messaging for use in clinical care and research. Very nice!

Mobile phones | A text a day... | Economist.com

The Economist has a great article in their latest edition entitled Mobile phones | A text a day... - unfortunately only available to subscribers (though the Economist Intelligence Unit has what looks like the same content online for free). This article contains news of great importance to clinicians and informaticians looking for ways to leverage the bewildering array of technical advances and the social transformations they are bringing about. The Positive Technology Journal picked up on it right away, so you may have already seen it, but I think it's important enough to warrant another posting.

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.

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.

The Body-Wide Web - threat or menace?

This month's issue of the online journal Nature Technology contains an article that is closely related to my previous post about wireless control of drug delivery. Entitled Welcome to the Body-Wide Web, it envisions a future - from the tea leaves I am reading, a not-too-distant future - when we will be "...equipped with an army of tiny sensors under [our] skin[s], in [our] blood vessels and perhaps even built into [our] clothes, wristwatch and eyeglasses." These sensors will keep tabs on each person's metabolism, circulation, and other potentially useful diagnostic markers.

What are the privacy implications? What unintended consequences await? I don't entirely agree with David Shenk's point of view, but he raises some issues of great concern.

"SCIENTISTS USE WIRELESS MICROCHIPS TO CONTROL DRUG RELEASE IN VIVO"

A very brief entry that appeared in the Nature Biotechnology online magazine Chronic, programmed polypeptide delivery from an implanted, multireservoir microchip device - Nature Biotechnology.  eWeek's story about it gives more details. The company whose researchers wrote the mini-article (MicroCHIPS) has also put out a press release on the invention.

I gotta go, so I can't comment. Yet...