Our High-Tech Health-Care Future

By FRANK MOSS
NYT

Cambridge, Mass.

WHY can’t Americans tap into the ingenuity that put men on the moon, created the Internet and sequenced the human genome to revitalize our economy?

I’m convinced we can. We are in the early phases of the next big technology-driven revolution, which I call “consumer health.” When fully unleashed, it could radically cut health care costs and become a huge global growth market.

Over the past few years, innovations like electronic health records and the use of mobile computing devices in hospitals have begun to improve medical care delivery. Consumer health information Web sites and online disease support groups have made millions of people active participants in their own health care.

But imagine a far more extreme transformation, in which advances in information technology, biology and engineering allow us to move much of health care out of hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, and into our everyday lives.

(More here.)