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This talk will argue that the needs of future healthcare can be met in full, and at an affordable cost, only by launching a radical new scientific and technological project that tackles the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) challenges surrounding the
knowledge that underpins decisions about personal, patient and community health. Despite excellent progress in disease research, very little of the resulting mass of new knowledge gets through to the patient or their doctor in a convenience and useable format.
There are three key reasons for this: 1) Doctors and patients have a limited understanding of modern genetics and other bioscience sub-disciplines. 2) Information produced by research is large in scale, complex in nature, and made up of a poorly resolved mix of true and false positive and negative findings, making it unsuitable for direct clinical deployment. 3) Key clinically useful information is difficult or impossible to locate, since much of it is never reported in structured electronic format, and the portion that is reported is dispersed across multiple data silos often with complex and burdensome data access mechanisms. Bridging this major ?ICT gap‘ will require a large-scale and globally orchestrated new discipline to be launched - which we propose to call 'I-Health Informatics'. This should aim to intelligently locate, distil, and repurpose all the key biomedical knowledge, framed in the specific context of a 'health avatar' for each patient, and then place this at the fingertips of doctors, the public, and many other stakeholders, in a real-time and multi-lingual format and mode that they can use it. The system should be 'self-optimizing, to continually generate new and better evidence based upon the outcomes of 'natural experiments' of life/medicine. |
