Archives: Expert Predictions

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.

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.

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).

This situation has to change, and HOTs (health-oriented telecommunications) are likely to be a major part of that change, helping to bring Americans a far better state of health for much less money.

Over the next decade, we will see health care become less doctor-centered, and more community- and family-centered. Medicine itself will become less of an art and more fact-based. Yet at the same time it will come to feel more humane.