I dedicate this particular post to my best mate, Lindsay.
If you are young enough, one morning after some decades, you may wake up to find a news headline like this:
The First Computer Scientist to Win the Novel Prize in Medicine:
--- for contributing to a grand breakthrough in medicine by designing the huge information anomaly detector dubbed as "Super-Kamiokande of Medical Science" which was essential for the discovery ---
Sounds like a cheap science fiction? Or a daydreamer's fantasy?
But there is one thing which some experts think might be able to make it happen.
Universal Semantic Interoperability - some call it Unified Field Theory of Health Informatics - which enables:
- Whom - any humans from any backgrounds and any machines from any makes
- What - to communicate and understand the healthcare information between each other
- How - in full extent and depth, over ages and beyond generations to come.
Here begins the saga, the quest for this Holy Grail of Health Informatics.
Hopefully it is not a fiction, but a real-time documentary.
Hi, Ei "Ray" Murakami san,
ReplyDeleteI also have read a few Japanese articles from your Japanese blog http://ehealthcaarekawaraban-j.blogspot.com/ and found them very interesting. As an IT specialist, I find a great potential as well as challenges in Health Informatics.
Obviously, health care is all about human life, which is the most valuable in the world. IT is essentially vulnerable and prone to errors. When IT plays a vital role in curing a patient with life threatening disease, a failure of IT can lead to critical consequences.
At the same time, we have to be practical. Even though nothing is more precious than human life, our resources are also painfully limited. IT can streamline tedious paperwork in medical care system and improve efficiency and quality of medical care.
We are facing great risk and difficult trade-offs. I think we should take up courage to advance with IT, not fearing too much of its negative aspects.
Sakai-san, thank you for your comment. Just call me Ray, it's OK.
ReplyDeleteIt might be beyond imagination of non-clinical people, actually health professionals do make mistakes and unfortunately fatal errors are not so rare compared with God-like expectations of general public.
Literally, to err is human and medicine is no exception.
The computer applications which directly support treatments in front-line are mission critical and should be error proof as you mentioned.
On the other hand, databases and applications which are used back-end to analyse cause of errors and potential for improvements can accommodate try and error methods.
Both ways computers can help to reduce errors in clinical practice but at the moment my interest weighs more on the latter approach.