[Hardhats-members] A Pill, a Scalpel, a Database

[Gregory Woodhouse]

A Pill, a Scalpel, a Database InformationWeek (02/13/06)No. 1076, P. 38; McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk Information technology is making strides in three critical areas of medicine: The filtering and delivery of information to the patient's bedside, allowing for personalized care; formatting existing data to obtain a richer, more helpful picture of the patient's condition; and the use of analytics to integrate data that yields new insights. IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences' Brett Davis says the interim between the discovery of new medical breakthroughs and their standard application--which can take as long as 17 years--is decreasing thanks to the use of IT and other new tools for research and collaboration. In addition to helping enable more customized patient treatments, health-care IT can cut the time and cost of testing new drugs and improve the development of safer, more targeted drugs via data mining and analysis. Analytic, pattern-recognition, and decision-support software can examine data from countless sources, and they could emerge as some of the most critical health-care tools. But delivering more timely and customized bedside care requires a national infrastructure for electronic health data that facilitates the exchange of standardized medical records, which President Bush flagged as a national goal to be realized by 2014. "The key tipping point will be in getting the national health IT infrastructure in place," notes Davis. Other challenges include the increasingly pressing issues of security, privacy, and ethical data usage as more and more health-care information becomes electronically accessible. Progress can also be hindered by hesitancy among some researchers to share information. Click Here to View Full Article  == Gregory Woodhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] "If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases." --Guy L. Steele, Jr.