Toward Smarter Health and Well-Being: An Implicit Role for Networking and Information Technology

Abstract

The number of people afflicted with chronic illnesses such as obesity, cancer, and diabetes has soared in recent years, generating new kinds of disparate medical challenges. In turn, these challenges have resulted in skyrocketing costs, preventable deaths, and medical malpractice claims. For example, studies have found nearly half of all US patients receive inadequate care each year, over 2 million are harmed by hospital-acquired infections, and over 1 million suffer disabling complications during surgery -even though half of these are thought to be avoidable. These challenges have catalyzed the beginning of a transformation in care delivery, from a health-care system that focuses on disease to one that must look after patients -including individuals and communities. To provide proper treatment to those who are chronically ill, the health-care system has to support improved individuals' health-related practices prior to the manifestation of disease; ensure that a range of practitioners can deliver quality clinical care during the onset of an illness; and facilitate patient-provider-family partnerships during post-disease wellness care. As we describe in this review, key advances in networking and information technologiesspanning patient monitoring, data visualization and decision making, robotics and computer vision for diagnosis and surgery, social networking for fostering communitybased support systems, and so on -stand to drive forward these changes. Together with social scientists, systems engineers, medical practitioners, and computer scientists, information systems scholars can help alter the nature of care delivery well into the twentyfirst century, ultimately contributing to a system that is much more safe, effective, reliable, and timely than it is today.

IT‐based clinical knowledge management in primary health care: A conceptual framework

“…This situation may simply be related to a “lack of awareness,” as an important gap has been found between the functionalities available in EMR systems and those actually being used by family physicians (Raymond et al, ). But it may also be attributed to governments, medical associations, and software vendors that emphasize the automational effects of health care IT solutions (Mooney, Gurbaxani, & Kraemer, ), seeking the “paperless” medical practice (Price, Singer, & Kim, ) rather than the informational and transformational effects that enable the “smart” medical practice (Gianchandani, ; OECD, ).…”

“…For their part, e-health care applications such as clinical knowledge management system and clinical decision support system are meant to improve physicians 0 knowledge management skills (Reed, Schifferdecker, & Homa, 2008) and support their decision making, allowing them to make clinical decisions that are more by family physicians (Raymond et al, 2015). But it may also be attributed to governments, medical associations, and software vendors that emphasize the automational effects of health care IT solutions (Mooney, Gurbaxani, & Kraemer, 1996), seeking the "paperless" medical practice (Price, Singer, & Kim, 2013) rather than the informational and transformational effects that enable the "smart" medical practice (Gianchandani, 2011;OECD, 2013).…”

Supporting the critical role of family carers in wellness management

“…Third, current health policy seeks to move wellness management out of the clinic and into homes and communities, particularly for older people, people with disabilities, and those who are chronically ill [14,15].…”

Predicting Participant Consent in mHealth Trials – A Caregiver’s Perspective

“…mHealth refers to the application of mobile information and communication technologies within the healthcare domain to support the delivery of healthcare services (Lester, Ritvo et al 2010) and represents a shift in focus from traditional paper-based to digitised approaches to delivering healthcare services in an effort to improve the nature of care delivery (Gianchandani 2011). In developing countries mHealth initiatives range from disease surveillance and control (e.g.…”