What health care will look like after the information technology revolution.
The idea that technology will change
medicine is as old as the electronic computer itself. Actually, even
older. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the man with the vision for the National
Institutes of Health, foresaw a Memex computer program that would allow
access to past books and records. A lone physician searching for a
diagnosis in far-flung case histories was one of the applications Bush
imagined.
Medicine is an information intensive industry. Yet there’s still no
medical Memex. Even though the Internet teems with health information,
study after study shows that medical care often differs greatly from
what the guidelines say—when there are guidelines. Doctors frequently
rely on their own experience, rather than the experience of millions of
patients who have seen thousands of doctors. Not only is the past lost,
the present is missing. How many times has a patient received a drug
that causes an allergic reaction, just because that information is not
available at the time it is needed?
