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Learn as much as you can about Digital Healthcare, which promises to revolutionize and streamline healthcare services
The Centers for Disease Control report that 90 percent of the nation’s $3.5 trillion spent annually on healthcare is for patients with chronic and mental health conditions. Heart disease, stroke, cancer, and obesity are among the most deadly. While politicians try to solve the problem of affordable healthcare, computing experts work behind the scenes developing tech that promises to revolutionize and streamline healthcare services. These innovations, known as digital healthcare, will not only improve the diagnosis and treatment of chronic and short-term illnesses but help patients improve their physical and mental health. By encouraging good health and catching problems early, the exorbitant cost of healthcare could drop significantly.
Explore five things you should know about the digital healthcare revolution.
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Read “Advice from an Expert” for career advice from Professor Harold Thimbleby, Healthcare Technology professional
Professor Harold Thimbleby is an international computer scientist. He works on making healthcare safer—especially since error is the third biggest killer after cancer and cardiovascular disease. Since computers are involved in every aspect of patient care, improving computers will improve everything and arguably help make healthcare safer more than any other intervention. Thimbleby says that hardly anyone is doing any research in this area (let alone funding it), which makes it even more important. He has found ways to radically improve the safety of many medical devices, such as halving error rates. He is currently funded by See Change (M&RA-P), Scotland to write a book/film which he plans to have as dramatic an effect on patient safety as Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed had on car safety.
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In healthcare, the third biggest killer after cancer and cardiovascular disease is medical mistakes. Since computers are involved in every aspect of patient care, improving computers will arguably help make healthcare safer more than any other intervention. In addition, computer technology is improving healthcare, surgery, and diagnoses through wearables, health monitors, robotics, and image processing. It’s also creating a wealth of new jobs. Overall healthcare occupations are projected to grow 18 percent from 2016 to 2026, much faster than the average for all occupations, adding about 2.4 million new jobs. We asked a panel of healthcare technology experts to weigh in on what job-seekers can expect between now and then.
Here’s what they had to say.
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Accompanying the release of the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer magazine’s special issue “Digital Health: Active and Healthy Living,” we conducted an interview with one of the issue’s authors, Giorgio Quer of Scripps. Quer is a senior staff scientist and director of artificial intelligence at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, wearable sensors, probabilistic models, AI for time series data, deep learning, and digital medicine. At Scripps Translational Institute, Quer works on the data analytics side of the All of Us Research Program, adopting probabilistic models and predictive analytics to extract information from large health datasets available through the program, as well as from other industrial collaborations. His goal is to extract and present this information in a useful way to medical clinicians and other users.
Discover what he had to say.
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Despite the ambiguities of healthcare security costs and benefits, market mechanisms can nudge healthcare organizations toward effective proactive and voluntary security actions. However, the effectiveness of market mechanisms suffers from the economic forces of the imperfect US healthcare market. Thus, market-driven investments must be supplemented with regulator intervention across all types of healthcare organizations. However, such regulatory intervention should focus on reinforcing the economic impact of information security rather than simply trying to force specific behavior.
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The Technical Comittee on Computational Life Sciences (TCCLS) is dedicated to interest in all aspects of computational methods and tools geared for modeling and analysis of life science problems, with emphasis on applications in biology, medicine and healthcare. It provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to exchange information and resources related to the fields of bioinformatics, systems biology, medical informatics and healthcare informatics. The TC sponsors scientific conferences as well as workshops.
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The goal of this special issue is to improve the state of the art and bring together the latest developments and applications using blockchain in the area of healthcare. The guest editors of this special issue aim to bring together the latest advances, experiences, findings, and developments related to blockchain and how this technology can increase accessibility, interoperability, privacy, and security to improve data accessibility among providers, researchers, insurance carriers, etc. They invite novel, innovative, and exciting contributions relating to blockchain applications in healthcare used for patient data, insurance claims, supply chain, and medical credentialing that will improve security, privacy, accessibility, interoperability, and accuracy.
Digital health intends to transform traditional care by increasing its scalability, reducing its cost, and, most importantly, improving the quality of care through the use of real-time health and behavior data.
