President Obama is holding an important Health Summit at
the White House to workshop his plans and ideas for health
reform with a wide range of influential stakeholders.
Hopefully he will keep his blackberry switched on because
this is now one of the emerging new tools commonly used to
deliver healthcare. President Obama, with his promotion of
information technology, broadband networks and electronic
health records, is poised to accelerate many positive
changes in healthcare, so what goals should be identified
for this Summit?
Let's look first at some of the current forces for change.
The business of eHealth on the Internet is expanding
rapidly. Two recent reports from the Pew Foundation and
Harris Interactive have confirmed that 75-80 per cent of
United States Internet users utilize the Internet for
health information and healthcare - that is around 140
million people per year. This is over 65% of the entire
adult population of the USA - an average of 8 million
people every day. Not surprisingly those individuals who
are carers, who have chronic illnesses, who have recently
been diagnosed with a medical condition or who have
broadband Internet connections use the Internet for
healthcare more commonly than other Internet users, and
their searches for health information are becoming a
regular habit, often several times per month.
Business sees the healthcare sector as a particularly
attractive industry that will benefit from web-based
technologies because of its enormous size, inefficiency and
information intensity, and companies like Google,
Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, as well as the
telecommunications giants like ATT and Verizon, all have
major health plans. Moreover, the healthcare industry is
particularly fragmented with a large number of
participants, including general practitioners and primary
care clinicians, specialists, institutions (public and
private hospitals and diagnostic companies), health funds,
pharmaceutical companies, retail pharmacies and, of course,
patients.
Our population is ageing with "baby-boomers" demanding
better quality healthcare. They are also determined to have
home-based health care, and will pay to avoid going into
nursing homes. At the same time employers are trying to
reduce the escalating cost of health care. Everyone
recognizes that the use of electronic medical records is a
way of improving the quality of care and making patient
information more available where it counts, at the time of
the doctor-patient consultation. There is a widespread
understanding that we need to shift the center of gravity
of care away from expensive hospitals and clinics, and back
to the home. It is not only cheaper to treat people at home
and online, with less hospital bills at thousands of
dollars per day, but patients can also become more involved
in their own care. With a single keystroke patient,
primary physician, specialist and home health nurse can be
brought together.
Many homes in the US have broadband Internet, or cable TV,
both of which can be used to deliver electronic home care
in future. The core infrastructure for healthcare is
shifting from bricks and mortar to bits and bytes.
Companies such as Intel are already developing technologies
to be used in the home for the elderly in particular - for
the baby boomers. These involve multiple health monitoring
options - not only to collect obvious health data such as
blood pressure, weight or pulse rates for patients with
heart conditions, but to monitor patients with Alzheimer's
as they move throughout their home, undertake survey
responses from family members via television, and as alarm
systems for any medical emergency. Telecommunications and
cable television companies are the likely future
infrastructure providers of tomorrow's health environment
as they replace hospital beds with homecare accessibility.
So what goals should the summit consider?
1. All patients should have access to their electronic
records and their health information in a secure and
privacy protected manner, most likely involving a unique
healthcare identifier
2. High quality Internet based healthcare systems and
networks should be further developed, with the Internet
being recognized as core health infrastructure
3. All health providers must move into the Information Age,
and be supported and trained to use electronic systems for
clinical work
4. Electronically mediated homecare, as well as healthcare
prevention and monitoring must receive more focus
5. Healthcare must become a more collaborative information
based industry, with major players from the Information
Technology world being recognized as core partners and
infrastructure providers
This is an exciting time for the health industry, and a
time when the right decisions can create very positive
health reform to help current and future generations of
Americans.
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This article is based on excerpts from the recently
published book "Your Health in the Information Age - how
you and your doctor can use the Internet to work together"
by Peter Yellowlees MD. Available at
http://www.InformationAgeHealth.com and most online
bookstores.
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