title: The role of technology and engineering models in transforming healthcare.
abstract: The healthcare system is in crisis due to challenges including escalating costs, the inconsistent provision of care, an aging population, and high burden of chronic disease related to health behaviors. Mitigating this crisis will require a major transformation of healthcare to be proactive, preventive, patient-centered, and evidence-based with a focus on improving quality-of-life. Information technology, networking, and biomedical engineering are likely to be essential in making this transformation possible with the help of advances, such as sensor technology, mobile computing, machine learning, etc. This paper has three themes: 1) motivation for a transformation of healthcare; 2) description of how information technology and engineering can support this transformation with the help of computational models; and 3) a technical overview of several research areas that illustrate the need for mathematical modeling approaches, ranging from sparse sampling to behavioral phenotyping and early detection. A key tenet of this paper concerns complementing prior work on patient-specific modeling and simulation by modeling neuropsychological, behavioral, and social phenomena. The resulting models, in combination with frequent or continuous measurements, are likely to be key components of health interventions to enhance health and wellbeing and the provision of healthcare.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA. pavelm@ohsu.edu
authors.forename: Misha
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pavel
authors.forename: Holly Brugge
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Jimison
authors.forename: Howard D
authors.initials: HD
authors.lastname: Wactlar
authors.forename: Tamara L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Hayes
authors.forename: Will
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Barkis
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Skapik
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kaye
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D001698:Biomedical Engineering; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology; D012371:Robotics