Future of eHealth: can consumers cure themselves?
In the next decade e-Health, or Connected Health, based on traditional Information Technology (IT) will expand to include molecular communications due to the emergence of nano-sensors capable of monitoring the health of individual cells. Artificially created boundaries between medicine and IT must be removed in order to take advantage of the new opportunity to dramatically improve the precision of medical diagnosis. Human physicians and nurses who remain unaided will not be able to utilize the new flow of molecular data to their patients' full advantage. Medicine will evolve into a new discipline that could be called "ITicine," reflecting the ubiquitous use of caring machines by both consumers and health professionals to reason with and learn from petabytes of behavioral, physiological and molecular data. Data about our human lives collected digitally will increase from 10% to 90% due to physical-sensing, socio-sensing & nano-sensing. The final goal is to allow consumers to cure themselves with the help of caring machines supported by omnipresent computing. The strategy for the future must then involve immediate and massive investment in intelligent medical software and adaptive networks, radical improvement of software development methodologies and social transition to a "machine trust" mentality, where health decisions can be made by computing agents and medical devices rather than doctors or patients. This could eliminate the error-prone features of the current healthcare system described by Dr. Craig Feied et al in "Indistinguishable from Magic: Health and Wellness in a Future of Sufficiently Advanced Technology".
Bushko
Renata G
RG
Future of Health Technology Institute, Hopkinton, MA, USA. bushko@fhti.org.
D019295:Computational Biology / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000639:trends*; D012648:Self Care