Intel highlights need for digital healthcare

By Warwick Ashford for Intel
Johannesburg, 14 Mar 2006

IT could help address worldwide shortages of healthcare professionals by enabling greater access to healthcare, improving quality of service, and reducing costs.

This is the view of Douglas Busch, Intel vice-president and CTO of the digital health group, who told the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last week that although the healthcare industry was made up of several interlocking enterprises, communication and other cross-industry processes were generally not yet enabled by IT.

According to Busch, 90% of transactions in the healthcare industry are still conducted using fax and postal services, making communication between the various role players extremely inefficient and costly. He said many processes were still "manual and backward" and IT was an excellent way of extending the reach of healthcare and lowering costs.

"This presents an overwhelming opportunity for IT developers to apply technology to improving productivity, collaboration, communication, workflow management, automation and data mining, sharing, security and storage in the healthcare industry."

Busch said other development opportunities lay in developing IT hardware for use in healthcare to improve information access, data acquisition and data aggregation. "Customised and IT-enabled equipment is vital to providing home care support and other cost efficient telemedicine through facilities such as remote diagnosis and surgery."

To illustrate this point, Busch demonstrated a concept tablet PC with a camera, wireless stethoscope, RFID reader and several sensors integrated into the unit, especially designed with no external openings or internal airflow to make it easier to clean and keep contamination free.

"Such a PC could improve the quality of healthcare by providing mobile access to all relevant data at the point of care for improved decision making to ensure more than current estimate of 50% of patents receive recommended treatments," he said.

However, Busch said unlocking the potential for IT to improve just about every aspect of the global healthcare industry depended largely on agreeing and fixing specific IT standards for the industry to enable developers to design interoperable and low-cost systems.