Topic: Getting

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.