...data needs to be collected and analysed efficiently. All matters where the IT industry has both the tools and the experience to help create a revolution.
But the biggest challenge is far greater than any of the above considerations. In the US, 15 percent of GNP is spent on health — a huge amount. Yet to maintain that level of care, this will have to grow to 25 percent by 2015 — which it cannot possibly do. Burns called it the bruising of the economy. The developed world is aging rapidly: by 2050, a fifth of its population will be over 60. The current system will not scale to cope with that. It cannot. If we started training doctors and nurses today, said Burns, the gap could not be closed. Healthcare as it exists today will not cope.
IT — and nothing else — has enormous potential to solve this problem. It can bring early diagnostics — infinitely better than treating a developed disease — into the home. It can also let elderly people stay at home far longer, giving them a much greater quality of life at a much lower cost than if they had to move into a traditional managed environment. It can help bring expertise to bear faster, with better data and more efficiency, than any imaginable alternative. There is no part of medicine where IT cannot make a huge difference, freeing the practitioners to do the jobs they trained for.
Of course, IT has had a chequered history in health care. Too many companies have come in, messed up and run away, generating a great and well-deserved suspicion with many health professionals and managers. More than ever, it's important to listen first, listen second, then listen again before deciding what to do. The people in healthcare are the ones qualified to make the decisions. But IT knows how to solve problems. There is no more pressing problem on the planet, let alone one that can so clearly be delineated as an issue of collecting, analysing and acting on data.
The potential is indeed huge — so big, it's hard to know where to start. How can universal standards be generated? How can the IT industry coordinate itself to create what will become a brand new industry bigger than any other on the planet? How can we even begin to know how to talk across the administrative, political, technical, legal and personal boundaries that mark the state of health and IT today? Yet nothing smaller than the biggest possible effort will do: anything else will fail, and failure will be miserable in every possible way.
Louis Burns and Intel are clearly determined to give this their best effort. It is unthinkable that anyone else should do less.
