By Joe Wivoda, Chief Information Officer
National Health IT Week 2014 has been a blast for me! I have blogged every day and tweeted about it as well @WivodaRural. I spoke with people in my community about the importance of patient portals and convinced quite a few people to sign up and access their health information. We even made signing up for a patient portal (or a family member’s) one of our wellness challenges at The Center! Life will be so much less exciting when HIT Week is over. Insert sad face here.
National Health IT Week 2014 has been a blast for me! I have blogged every day and tweeted about it as well @WivodaRural. I spoke with people in my community about the importance of patient portals and convinced quite a few people to sign up and access their health information. We even made signing up for a patient portal (or a family member’s) one of our wellness challenges at The Center! Life will be so much less exciting when HIT Week is over. Insert sad face here.
Regardless, this is the final HIT Week blog, and
what is a blog series without a wild prediction for the future? I have been
blathering on about how we are in the “bag phone” stage of HIT, and now it is
time to imagine what life will be like when we are in the “iPhone” or “Android”
stage of HIT. Well beyond Meaningful Use, when patient access to data is
universal and expected. Data is easily shared among providers. Welcome to
2024!
Ten years from now, patient engagement will not be
a buzz word, it will be just another way we access health care. Primary care
visits will begin with accessing our mobile device. Thanks to interfaces with
wearable devices such as watches and glasses, the provider can see our heart
rate, temperature, Sp02, respiration, and other vital signs over the last
several weeks. If we have a chronic condition, such as diabetes, there will be
a near-constant monitoring of our blood glucose levels. Since this information
can be stored indefinitely (storage is essentially limitless) and computing
power is significantly greater than today (Moore’s law will have broken down,
but still…) most providers will be notifying their patients when the data
indicates that there may be a problem. No longer will we need to call the
clinic, they will call us when our data indicates there may be something wrong.
Telemedicine will be commonplace. What we may call
an “e-visit” today will just be a “visit” to the provider. Primary and
specialty visits will utilize technology that is at our fingertips to provide
the right care at the right time, and most often at the patient’s home or
office. Simple, inexpensive peripherals will be able to monitor our vitals and
likely be able to perform common lab tests. Imagine doing your own urinalysis
in the “comfort” of your home.
Apps on your smartphone will be able to utilize
powerful centralized systems like IBM's “Watson” to diagnose complex diseases.
Already apps like iTriage can be very useful for simple diagnoses, so imagine where we will be in 10 years!
A few years ago, a futurist told me that we might
be 10 years away from having a “tricorder” from Star Trek: A device that can be
held up to a person that can “sense” what physical disorders may exist. There
is now an X Prize for just such a device, so I expect in 10 years that invasive
testing will be rare. Instead we will walk in a “phone booth” (Remember those?
They are collectible now.) that will analyze our vitals and other things to
determine what ails us.
This is a long way from where we are in 2014.
Consider that the cores of most of our EHRs were written 20 years ago or more,
so we do have a long way to go. Increased data analytics, more complete data
capture, and huge data repositories that include DNA data will be required in
the future. This isn't science fiction; we are well on the way to be able to do
these things. In fact, I am probably being much less imaginative than I could
be. What do you think National HIT Week 2024 will be like?
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