In our readings this week we have spent some time talking about the limits of digital information, the intersection of ethics and our technology, and how much technology we are willing to let into our life's. For this posting I will be focusing on how e-healthcare can change how we interact with our doctors, our pharmacies, and each other.
Like many other aspects of our society, health care will become more and more of a 2 sided conversation (or many many sided). Like the revolution in news media that has taken place, as media is distributed now multi-dimensionally and through user demand, healthcare information will become more easially accessed, more personal, and available to all who have web access.
Already this has taken place with websites such as www.WebMD.com, which allows users to look up ailments, treatments, support groups, and research what ever they choose. Internet chat rooms have long been utilized heavily for people who share common conditions to discuss treatments, coping mechanisms, and to share successes and failures. In a sense health-related social networking is already a very prevelant usage in our society. Increasingly our medical experiance will become more bottom up, then the top-down paternalistic medical relationship that has been tradition for many many years. However, this can be a very powerful thing as patients would be more aware of their own health, and more responsible for seeking treatment. This influx of information could make preventative medicine (which is often the most cost effective) more prevalent and useful.
In fact, the way that doctors share information between each others is rapidly becoming more web-based, through blogs and other networking portals. Many in the healthcare profession realize the immense potential of practically instant, world-wide communication of healthcare professionals. Seeing a world renown specialist could become as easy as setting up a web-appointment, which has potential to extend higher level of care into lesser served areas, where a doctor could provide a consult without actually leaving his residence.
Furthur more medicine will be physically more personable as the technologies become cheaper, and the understanding greater of human genomic data. It is not unforseen that in our lifetimes our genomic data could be used by our physicians to prescribe correct dosages, avoid side affects, and avoid conditions that a person is particullarly prone too (such as heart failure), instead of asking you when you are treated if you have a family history of a condition, a doctor could see if YOU had a predisposition. Of great sensitivity is the availability of health information to drug companies for their research in development, but in the not to distant future, with proper controls over who see's what, it is very resonable to think that drug companies will be able to track the effectivness of their drugs and group patients based on similarities to study the reprocussions of their drug.
Technology has made huge leaps in the previous 10 years, and it has begun to payoff for the healthcare sector as research is being conducted as we speak that will improve and lenghten our lives, and while the social implications are large and the short term economic costs great, long-term it is a necessarly and imporant avenue for technology to improve the world we live in.
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