Having [Health-Oriented Telecommunications] would do four major things to health care: Develop new diagnostics and therapeutics (or support traditional doctoring, but with cooler gadgets) … Immerse traditional medicine in a wider, deeper information net (or get the docs and hospitals wired) … Tie individuals directly into info nets (or get everybody wired, top- down) … Tie individuals directly into decision nets (or get everybody wired, top-down, bottom-up, and sideways).
Predictor: Flower, Joe
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Joe Flower explains the types of changes that could come in health care through the use of networked computing. Flower writes:”Health-oriented telecommunications can fix such information problems, while making much larger changes possible. Having the HOTs would do four major things to health care: 1. Develop new diagnostics and therapeutics (or support traditional doctoring, but with cooler gadgets) … The same technology, in the future, will be able to put a doctor at every bedside in every rest home, in every ambulance, and even in your own home. 2. Immerse traditional medicine in a wider, deeper information net (or get the docs and hospitals wired). Medicine is still pretty seat-of-the-pants stuff. Most procedures, in most medical settings, have simply never been rigorously examined to determine when the procedures are needed, when they work, and what would make them work better. To do that, you need what has only recently become available: Massive numbers of computers across the country, reporting huge amounts of data from actual cases. Put that information together in databases … and suddenly you have a way to say, ‘These five hospitals do a lot better than everyone else on ectopic pregnancies (or premature infants, or renal cancer). Let’s go see what they are doing differently.’ … On the patients’ end, this is pushing hospitals and doctors toward fully computerized patient record and clinical systems. Tie the entire health care system into a vast data structure, and you get a system that can learn how to do it better, faster, cheaper, and easier. 3. Tie individuals directly into info nets (or get everybody wired, top- down). The health info-net is already beginning to spread beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office … In health care, you can cut costs and do a better job at the same time if you help people learn how to improve their health, if you catch disease as early as possible, and if you take care of people at the lowest appropriate level of intensity – keep the colds and the aching backs out of the Emergency Room; keep Intensive Care free of patients with ailments that a little prevention could have caught … Our information net is developing rapidly, but so far one of its most powerful possibilities – helping us stay alive and healthy – has been lagging far behind. 4. Tie individuals directly into decision nets (or get everybody wired, top-down, bottom-up, and sideways) … We would save money in big buckets if we gave people an easy way to grab good information about their own health at home … Such a system would know you. You would give it your digitized medical history and answer its questions.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Medical/Professional
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Other Revolution in Health Care: Leave Hillary and Bill Out of It … The Health Care System is Going to Change Drastically Over the Next Decade
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/healthcare_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney