Hot New Medium: Text
We are smashing arbitrary print-centric boundaries among author, editor, and audience. These categories did not exist before the invention of moveable type, and they will not survive this decade.
We are smashing arbitrary print-centric boundaries among author, editor, and audience. These categories did not exist before the invention of moveable type, and they will not survive this decade.
Developed and used properly, health-oriented telecommunications … carry the possibility of providing major assistance in revolutionizing health care, making it both cheaper and better, spreading it wider, involving people in making decisions about their own lives, helping America (and eventually the world) build truly healthier communities.
Part of the reason self care, prevention, and health promotion are so undeveloped is that traditional print and mass media do not allow individuals to access health information when they need it in a form that aids appropriate decision making. Health-oriented telecommunications are likely to revolutionize this part of the health system by making available anything people need or want to know about their health 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the home, school, workplace, or through public terminals.
(ARPA)] pictures every soldier carrying four small devices: 1) a global positioning system locator; 2) a friend/foe identification broadcaster … 3) a vital-sign monitor that can sense blood pressure, temperature, and other indicators, and evaluate whether the soldier is all right … and 4) an automatic communications link that would start broadcasting as soon as the vital signs went beyond normal parameters.
A two-way, digital, switched broadband fiberoptic network that extended into people’s homes would allow a lot more of the frail elderly and the chronically ill to live independently, rather than in convalescent homes.
The rapid increases in computer speed and power that are expected by the year 2000 – widely estimated at a 104 percent increase in computing power and a 107 percent increase in transmission speed – will make a huge difference. Combine such databases with expert systems (which mimic the decision-making skills of experts) and you get expert systems that can learn.
Aggregating vast amounts of clinical information online will lead to “n-dimensional queriable research databases.” A researcher will be able to ask “what if” questions, and answer them by dipping into databases with hundreds of millions of records, and aggregating all cases that fit.
Eventually all health records, from insurance information to X-rays and MRI scans will go digital – and eventually you will carry all that information with you on a card.
Arthur D. Little, a well-known consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducted one study that counted $15 billion the U.S. could save every year just by digitizing everyone’s medical records and putting them online, available to anyone with the right pass codes anywhere in the country.
The ARPA program transports the “teledoc” to the scene of the battle. According to this concept, instead of throwing the wounded soldier on a Humvee and racing for the field hospital, medics would pull the soldier into a miniature trauma center crammed into a lightly armored vehicle. Guided by “telementor” doctors at the hospital, medics would do everything possible to stabilize their charges on the spot – including telepresence surgery – before taking that long, risky journey back from the front lines.