Viable Health Systems Via Distributed Computing Systems

Bruce Schatz, Interim Department Head, Medical Information Science, UIUC

Healthcare is the dominant item in modern economies, and rapidly growing as the population ages. Current health systems are oriented towards acute illness in hospitals -- there is no current infrastructure that can handle the coming scale of chronic illness in homes. Part of the problem is organizational, as health systems handle most interactions with medical experts rather than less expensive professionals and patients. Part of the problem is technological, as the information infrastructure to manage health for whole populations is still largely theoretical.

Viable Health Systems are possible with new Information Technologies. Health Care is a complex system organizationally and technologically. Health monitors can measure the status of people in their homes and automatically route them to the appropriate provider. Such an infrastructure can be supported on a national scale, by supporting personal health records. Local interactions track progress of chronic conditions, while global analyses of individual records discover similar cases to guide individual treatments.

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