Intelligent Healthcare

The United States is poised for a revolutionary change in how Healthcare is perceived, how it is managed and how it serves us; both as patients and as a society. For many, the only solution to better Healthcare lies entirely in massive amounts of new spending – however a reexamination of the processes underlying Healthcare suggests that money and technology alone can be wasted if not properly orchestrated. The true potential for the next generation of Healthcare provision in this country requires a paradigm shift in perceptions, a recognition of several fundamental truths that when taken together will redefine the practice of medicine in our lifetime.

Truth 1 - Technology has always played a pivotal role in medicine across the ages, yet today technology is much more than an enabler - it is transformative force. Technology is becoming intelligent.

This is not the same as Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the sense that the technology thinks for itself or for us. Rather, the intelligence we're talking about here refers to the ability to combine and contrast information and infuse that data within the day to day practice of medicine and to view medicine as continuum rather than a series of potentially unrelated events or incidents.

Truth 2 – Healthcare is a system of systems. The human body is an integrated mechanism rather than a set of disconnected parts and pieces to be managed in care “stovepipes.” Every element within any given hospital exists symbiotically with every other to form a single, working entity. And every hospital, doctor’s office and clinic forms a symbiotic relationship with every other throughout the nation to comprise our Healthcare infrastructure. Impacts to any portion of this delicate, tiered structure affect every other aspect of Healthcare provision.

Truth 3 – The number one challenge in medicine is now and has always been complexity. Complexity takes its form in the vast wealth of medical knowledge, techniques and tools available to us, as well as in the monumental amount of biological diversity present within each and every human body. Defeating complexity requires the ability to adapt rapidly to changing paradigms and situations – institutions too rooted in tradition often loose opportunities to excel and overcome previously insurmountable challenges.

Truth 4 – The time spent outside of the healthcare system is just as important or perhaps even more important than time spent within it. Quality of care outcomes do not begin or end based upon treatment events – they are the result of a continuum care that lasts a lifetime.

Truth 5 – When comprehensive Healthcare isn’t provided to all, all are placed at risk. This imbalance costs more than having paid for everyone’s care as it throws the entire system into havoc and introduces an element of chaos that cannot be properly mitigated. All care may not be equal, but there are standards for adequate care that can be followed as a public health safeguard that can and will improve our current situation.

The potential that is nearly upon us is staggering - we are close to being able to position all medical knowledge at any practitioner's fingertips and provide it to them in such a way that allows for efficient contextualization, per patient and per scenario. Intelligent Healthcare is a responsive interactive process - a dynamic collaboration between caregivers from across the globe and between individual caregivers and patients.

Intelligent Healthcare recognizes that healthcare quality and the ability to deconflict knowledge are intricately intertwined. As the nation stands ready to reexamine its Healthcare policies, we have an opportunity to extend that exploration beyond considerations of access, affordability and insurance coverage options to a core examination of the processes of Healthcare itself.

We don’t need more money, more equipment more prescription drugs, more genetic testing per se, what we need first is the ability to correlate the capabilities and knowledge we’ve already attained, and a way to provide generic care options to all – doing that would provide us with a phenomenal increase in efficiency and quality of care in the very near future.

Copyright 2008, Stephen Lahanas

The Virtual Healthcare Portfolio - Part 1

Actionable Information is more than data. An Actionable solution is one that allows us to rapidly extract and interpret information from a growing sea of data in order to support complex and time sensitive decision-making processes. Today’s healthcare practitioners often have more data than they can handle and that situation is going to scale exponentially as more aspects of medicine are automated and digitized. An increasing array of medical sensors and digital diagnostic capabilities are being introduced every year into the field of medicine – that data must be reconciled, compared and assessed – often in real-time.

The Medical Chart as we know it, both in paper form and its current digital incarnations will not be able to handle the quantity and complexity of data associated with the practice of healthcare. Medical Charts are in fact merely the portal or user interface to the more critical functionality that needs to be built behind the scenes.

According to Crounse (2006), “Two studies in 2005 (one published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the other in Pediatrics) indicated that poorly designed clinical information systems actually can lead to an increase in medical errors. This is ironic given that these systems are intended to reduce errors.” The first generation of EHR / EMR solutions has not met their potential, either in terms of Caregiver adoption or capability. According to Simon et al (2007), only 28% of physicians in Massachusetts had adopted EHR solutions and of those less than half had the ability to order or track laboratory results through those systems.

The current EHR / EMR paradigm is scaleable, something new is needed...


Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Welcome to the Healthcare Informatics Blog

There is no other industry that can benefit more from Information Technology than Healthcare. Medicine is primarily dependent upon knowledge - management of knowledge, management of information as it's happening and management of the processes and practice of healthcare.

The impact of information technology on healthcare though is only now beginning to be felt. For whatever reason, pervasive adoption of this technology has been slow to occur. 'Healthcare Informatics' is a catch-all term that refers to comprehensive data architectures specifically crafted to support the processes and practice of medicine.

The Semantech Inc. Healthcare Informatics Blog will examine those processes, practices and the technology implementation considerations necessary to achieve greater automation of the healthcare industry. We believe that this automation will provide the single most significant improvement in seen in the healthcare industry in over a century - both in terms of accuracy and efficacy in treatment as well as in accessibility and affordability. If healthcare can be become more focused, more precise and can track all related information in context - we can empower healthcare providers to better manage complex care with new arsenals of tools and techniques.

We hope you enjoy your visits here.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.